


Conversations

by profaneangel



Category: Political RPF, Political RPF - US 20th c.
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:57:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 42,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/profaneangel/pseuds/profaneangel
Summary: "Bill Clinton and I started a conversation in the spring of 1971, and more than thirty years later we're still talking"; a lifetime spent in conversation.





	1. Rhiannon

 

>   _"Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night, and wouldn't you love to love her?_
> 
> _Takes through the sky like a bird in flight, and who will be her lover?_
> 
> _All your life, you've never seen a woman taken by the wind..."_

_  
_ New Haven, Connecticut - Spring, 1971

Bill Clinton first saw the girl out of the corner of his eye.

Admittedly, he did not attend the class often, and so he could deduce with almost perfect certainty that he had not seen the girl before. She was bent over her desk in concentration, folded over her papers and books with a pair of determined shoulders, but she was not tense; rather, there was a remarkable sense of self possession that existed in this gesture. The girl had a curtain of thick hair, a cross between blonde and brunette, that obscured her profile save for the tip of her nose. He watched her, observing how one hand scribbled furiously while the other rested indolently beneath her chin. Suddenly, she looked up, revealing her face. She wore eyeglasses as thick as the bottom of a Coca Cola bottle, and no makeup. But it was a pleasant face, with pretty features: a generous, red mouth and a straight nose and high cheekbones. She had, Bill mused, a kind of raw, clean beauty. Then, for a moment, she discarded her glasses to swipe at a lock of hair, and when she drew her hand away, he caught a glimpse of her eyes. Her irises were composed of several hues of brilliant blues, swirling about one another and then converging at the center, almost shining in the mid-afternoon light.

The girl did nothing particularly demonstrative to pique his interest; she did not even raise her hand. But the profundity of her subtle mannerisms, in her most natural, prosaic state, intrigued Bill and he kept his eyes trained on her for the remainder of the class. He studied her, as if she was an abstract painting or a curious verse of prose. He noted her behaviors: the tilt of her head, the gentle fingers stroking a textbook's spine, the soft bite when she clamped down on her bottom lip in attentiveness. At the class's end, he scooped up his belongings and trailed her to the door. She wore culottes the shade of a bright orange peel.

Bill got close enough to her where he could reach out and touch her, and he almost did, extending a wavering hand to tap her shoulder. But before he could make contact, he pulled back. He hugged his textbooks to his chest and stood still, oblivious to the other students milling about him. He watched her as she walked down the hallway. Her back was a line, as straight as a ramrod, and yet, her hips were soft and feminine, swaying just slightly. He continued to stare at her, until she turned the corner and disappeared. Bill looked down at his own palm a moment, wondering what had made him draw away. _Once I touch her,_ he realized, _I'm going to start something that I can't stop._

 

Hillary Rodham saw the boy, and thought perhaps he had been looking at her.

She spotted him as she crossed the quad, taking long strides beneath the blossoming spring foliage. Her books were pressed to her chest and her hair was pulled back from her face; her generous steps were purposeful, as she was already late to her first class of the morning. Despite her hurry, she was almost sure she had caught the boy staring, and so she couldn't help herself from throwing a second glance over her shoulder.

He sat underneath an oak tree, leaning against its rotund trunk. Even tucked into himself, Hillary could distinguish his large, stocky build by his broad shoulders and chest. He had a mass of brown hair, tinged red by the morning sunshine, and a modest beard burgeoning about his jawline. Hillary noticed his full eyebrows and generous sideburns. She managed a smirk; he reminded her of Viking. She watched a moment longer. He was peering at a book open on his lap, and he turned the pages with slender, nimble fingers. She liked the way he looked. His physicality was striking and masculine, but it was juxtaposed by a poetic demeanor; despite his size, he eluded a certain gentleness. _And, maybe_ , she considered, _he's handsome under all that hair._

The abrupt chiming of chapel bells signaling the top of the hour startled her out of her thoughts, and Hillary spiraled back to reality. "Shit," she murmured under her breath, glancing down at her own wristwatch. She would be late. Sprinting, she took off across the quad.

 

The law library at Yale had heavy, mahogany awnings and enormous, gilded windows that jutted upward; by contrast, the desks and bookshelves were short, filled with stacks, illuminated by low lying lights that hung from the rafters. The library itself was long and narrow, inducing a hefty walk from one end to the other.

Bill and Hillary found themselves at nearly opposite ends that spring evening. Hillary was leaned up against a bookcase, pressing her back against its shelves. She had a thick volume open in her hands, but she hadn't looked down at the pages for several minutes. She had seen the boy again, loitering near the other end, and she saw, too, that he was staring, again. Hillary had seen him about campus quite a few times since she had first spotted him on the quad that morning, and she was sure that each time he had been gazing at her. She could see him doing it now; there was a man next to him, talking at him, but ever so often he would turn away, and look across at her. She knew his name now, too. The prior evening she and a friend had passed him in the law school lounge, where he was holding an audience rapt, speaking passionately about - it seemed, of all things - watermelons, and punctuating his story with exaggerated hand gestures. "Who _is_ that?" Hillary had inquired nonchalantly. "Oh, that's Bill Clinton," her friend had said, and then, rolling her eyes, "He's from Arkansas. That's all he ever talks about."

Bill had been embroiled in a conversation with his friend Jeff, who was eager to recruit him for the Yale Law Journal. Bill had smiled and told him he appreciated the offer, but he intended to return to Arkansas after graduation, and run candidates for public office down there - perhaps, eventually, himself. This hadn't deterred Jeff, however, and he'd kept up a persistent campaign for the past five minutes. In spite of himself, Bill had listened politely and attentively, until he saw the girl, again. He had caught glimpses of her all over campus since he had first noticed her in their mutual class: the quad, the lounge, the commons. Each time, he couldn't help but stare, and drink her in, and marvel at her. He had not spoken a word to her, and yet he felt that he sensed so much from the way she carried herself: a strength, a poise, an effervescence. Gazing at her across the stacks, having tuned out Jeff entirely by now, Bill realized that tonight, for the first time, she seemed to be staring back.

Despite the wealth of space between them, it also registered with Hillary that they were now both looking directly at one another. The man next to him seemed to still be speaking fervently, putting up a display of enthused hand motions, but he was no longer managing even the occasional glance back at him. She exhaled, recognizing the weight of the moment. After days of stolen glances and quick looks over the shoulder, they were, finally, eye to eye. The intensity of his gaze encouraged her. Without giving it further thought, Hillary slammed the book shut.

Bill watched as she closed the book, set it down, and then began to walk. He knew she was walking towards him; she hadn't broken their stare. Bill was engulfed by sparring emotions of panic and excitement; her expression was blank, and so he could not predict how she would react. Part of him worried that he had been caught red handed, and she was going to call him out on it. Perhaps she wasn't interested; maybe she'd say, with little humor, that it wasn't polite to stare. But another part remained hopeful. She had stared back. As she drew closer, Bill was, once again, overcome by a certain admiration for her; with determination, she had crossed the entire length of the law library, her shoulders squared confidently and her posture as unwavering as the first day he'd gaped at it in the hallway.

Hillary was near enough to deepen the gaze by looking straight into his eyes. There was no turning back now, and with this knowledge, her heart hammered in her chest. She had always been a forthright person, but she was aware that this gesture took some nerve. Yet she also felt, somehow, that this was innately correct. That this would mean something. And so, silencing any remaining doubts, she stepped forward, closing the space between them to a few final feet, and stuck out her hand. "If you're going to keep staring at me," she declared, "And now I'm staring back, we ought to know each other's names. I'm Hillary Rodham."

Bill, effectively, was bowled over by her introduction. The first words out of her mouth seemed to validate everything he had perceived about her from his remote observations. He was duly impressed; in all his life, never had a girl spoken to him in such a frank manner. Most girls melted around him, dissolving into flirtatious giggles and flattening their hands over their mouths to suppress high pitched squeals. He was an eloquent orator who wielded an arsenal of smooth charms, and so he was the one, typically, who called the shots, who navigated the conversation, who never ran out of anything to say. But standing before this girl, he found himself speechless. He opened his mouth to speak, and the words didn't instantly formulate on his tongue as they usually did. In later years, he would remember barely being able to recall his own name. It was a minute before he finally composed himself and then took the hand that she had offered. "Bill Clinton - nice to meet you."

Hillary, of course, had already known his name, but she nodded as if absorbing new information. His accent was thick, Southern. She smiled. This seemed to put him at ease, and so he laughed a little, breaking into a grin. It was the grin of a little boy, and it heartened her. She really took a look at his face, and up close she liked it even better. She was amused by his long hair and his smattering of a beard, and she detected flecks of green in his blue eyes. His grip was firm but friendly, and the insides of his palm were warm. As he pulled away, she found herself taking notice of his hands. She thought them beautiful. His wrists were slender and his fingers were elegant, ebbing at the tips of his fingernails. Glancing at them, she felt a sudden swell of both eroticism and childish affection toward him.

They talked a few minutes, small talk, nothing rather deep: about their respective years, a little bit about their plans of study, and an awkward introduction of Jeff, whose presence had escaped Bill's mind until Hillary nodded softly in his direction. As she spoke, Bill found that everything that he had admired about her from afar was only magnified up close. She looked exceptionally pretty tonight, with her flat hair cascading over her shoulders and parted in the middle to frame her face. While they conversed, she lifted her glasses and Bill found himself peering into her eyes once again, as blue and brilliant as he had believed them to be, underscored by stylishly thick yet carefully shaped eyebrows. Most of all, he was stunned by her smile. She had an enormous, open one, that flashed her entire set of white teeth and an overbite so delicate it was sexy.

Their conversation was ultimately short; realizing the time, Hillary excused herself. She turned on her heel, then glanced at him over her shoulder. "If you see me around," she called, "Don't be a stranger." Bill beamed. That hopeful, boyish grin. "Oh, I won't."

 

The next time they saw one another was a couple days later, on the last day of the semester. Bill spotted her as he was descending a flight of stairs to the ground floor of the law school. Emboldened by her words from the other evening, he quickened his pace to catch up with her. "Hey," he said, reaching out for shoulder.

Hillary knew who it was before even wheeling around to face him. "Hey yourself," she said, smiling back.

She was wearing a billowy, floral skirt so long it skimmed the floor. Bill had noticed it on his way down, and he complimented her on it. "My mother made it," she chuckled. He found this endearing - as a boy, Bill's own mother, Virginia, had relished dressing him up all sorts of bright, patterned outfits that made for entertaining, if not somewhat embarrassing, childhood photos. "Well, your mother has good taste," he replied, his eyes sparkling.

They chatted a minute more, and then Hillary explained, "I'm on my way to register for next term's classes." She motioned towards the door.

Bill thought fast. He was determined to spend more time with her. "I need to do that, too," he divulged. This was a lie; he had registered that morning. But it served as the perfect pretext for his next suggestion. "Let's go together."

So they waited, together, in the long, winding line extending before the registrar's desk, and talked. Soon they were swapping abbreviated biographies. Hillary listened first as Bill told her about his Arkansas. He was born in a place called Hope, which struck her as kind of figurative, and raised in the town of Hot Springs. His names, first and middle - William Jefferson - were after his father, a man who had been killed in an automobile accident three months before he was born. His last name, Clinton, was not his father's, but rather the surname of the man his mother had married when he was four, with whom she had had his half-brother. He had passed away a few years prior. "Daddy, a troubled kinda guy," Bill mused, "Alcohol and all of that. A drunk. Wasn't that great to mom, but she married him twice." He'd taken his name, he explained, because it seemed easier for all of them to share the same one, and because, admittedly, he'd felt strange being the only Blythe in a house of Clintons. He then spoke of his mother, a "character," somewhat eccentric and exotic, "like a Southern belle, but a little off kilter." Hillary sensed a great love for her. Bill had gone to Georgetown, and had a won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, where he had spent the previous year. However, like many of his peers fearing the draft, he had left before obtaining a degree and chosen to enroll at Yale.

Bill wasn't sure what exactly had made him pour out so much of his personal story to her, including some of the ugly details - with most girls, he occasionally shared bits and pieces, usually anecdotes about the firm, juicy melons. Then again, Hillary Rodham was unlike most anyone he'd met before, man or woman. As he talked, she'd listened closely and genuinely; he observed how her eyes widened when she was surprised, and crinkled when she was concerned. Hillary found his childhood tragic, and it moved her, but he also didn't seem discouraged by any of the setbacks thrown his way. Touched by his openness, she decided to reciprocate his generosity.

It was Bill's turn to listen carefully now, and he did, leaning in toward her. A year younger than him, she, too, was born in the post War baby boom, in Park Ridge, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She had had the kind of all-American, suburban upbringing extolled by middle class white families in the fifties. Unlike Bill, she'd been raised in a conventional, nuclear family, with both of her parents and two younger brothers. Growing up, she had idolized her father, Hugh, a self made man with his own business manufacturing draperies and curtains. In return, Hugh had a soft spot for her, and, a Republican, he'd shaped her early political views. "I was a Goldwater Girl, if you can believe it," she joked. Nowadays, they didn't quite see eye to eye on most issues; she was a true daughter of the sixties, and he showed disdain for long haired hippies and free love proponents. But there was little love lost. Bill figured that Hillary's father was probably in awe of the headstrong, free thinking daughter he'd raised. Mostly, however, she spoke of her mother, Dorothy. "She was essentially abandoned by her parents when she was twelve, left to care for her baby sister," Hillary recalled, and this struck a chord with Bill. "Became a maid, really." Dorothy had taught her all the important things in life, had instilled in her the conviction of her Methodist faith, "do all the good you can, in all the ways you can," and had been, she smiled, a closeted Democrat in their conservative home. Hillary left her small, Midwestern bubble when she'd gone east for college, to Wellesley, one of the Seven Sisters schools where the ripple effects of the political and social tumult of the late sixties reverberated through her time there. "And now, I'm here," she said, shrugging. "I think that, maybe, the best way to change the system is from the inside out. And there's a lot to change."

By this point, they'd reached the front of the line. The registrar looked over the spectacles perched on the bridge of her nose, and offered Hillary a smile, handing her the form. Then she glanced over at Bill. "Bill, what are you doing here? You registered this morning!"

Bill's cheeks reddened, his cover blown. But Hillary thought it was hysterical and let out a large laugh, her mouth opening fully as she threw her head back. It was a wonderful laugh, whole and uproarious and racy, and he loved it.

She began to fill out the long form, and Bill seized the opportunity. "Have you seen the Rothko exhibit over at the art gallery?"

"No, but I'd like to," Hillary replied. She kept her eyes on the form but Bill could see a smile twitching at the corner of her lips.

"Well, me either," said Bill, deciding their remaining plans for the afternoon.

To Bill's chagrin, however, when they arrived at the gallery it was locked. He realized that he'd forgotten that the university workforce was on strike and thus the museum was closed. He panicked, then caught sight of the security guard idling near the front entrance. He raced over to him and pled his case; if he'd let them in, Bill would clean up the sticks and litter they had accumulated in the gallery sculpture garden thanks to the recent lack of upkeep. The guard, an older man with a feathery white mustache, looked at Bill, then over at Hillary, and back at Bill. "Alright," he said with a small smile, and fished out his key ring.

"What an excellent negotiator," Hillary teased.

"Not my typical political stance to go against the working man, but I'll make an exception - just this once." He winked.

Yale's art gallery was usually not crowded, but just the two of them strolling through the halls was a distinct experience on its own, their voices and footsteps echoing and commingling to yield a soft symphony. Rothko had been an experimental painter, refusing to adhere to any one art movement in his lifetime, though most of his works were abstract and expressionist. The paintings on display illustrated Rothko's dabbling with color play: some were arrays of bold pigment blocks set to clashing backgrounds, while others were gentler gradients, inducing more subtle tonal transitions. Hillary stood before a large canvas where a neon red melted into hot pink before mellowing to a sunset orange. She studied it, appreciating the collocating effect of startling and serene shades. She looked over at Bill, who was lost in a ruddy piece combining dull blues, greens, and browns. There was silence as they peered about the exhibit, but it was a comfortable silence, filled with shared enchantment and intrigue. Hillary realized she'd never before felt so at ease with someone, so fast.

"It's beautiful," she breathed, her voice barely above a whisper. 

Bill turned his head towards her. She was still facing the painting, and she radiated elegance in this tableau, with a graceful posture and a pretty profile accentuated by the cream walls. If he were a man of cliches, and if she were a woman who would buy them, he would've told her,  _and so are you_. He'd settle, instead. "I know."

Afterwards, they sauntered into the garden, a winding warren where ornate sculpture were flanked by excessive greenery, trees of impressive girth, and hedges bristling with flowers. In accordance with the season, everything was in bloom, and the delicate spring buds matched the floral Bill had admired on Hillary's skirt. Bill set about tidying, and Hillary eyed a Henry Moore casting entitled "Draped Seated Woman." It was a fitting monicker; the statue was large, fashioned of bronze, and the woman's lap was flat and wide. She climbed onto it and sat in the lap. Bill finished up his maintenance duties, and plucked a sprig of ivory laurels from a bush before returning to her. "For you, m'lady," he professed, making a show of genuflecting before the regal statue. Hillary laughed and accepted the proffered gift. "Why, thank you, kind sir," she replied, emulating Bill's phony pretense. She brushed her fingers against the velvety petals, savoring the touch of the downy surface, and then tucked it behind her right ear.

The woman's lap was generous enough to accommodate two, and so he clambered up next to her. They talked, quietly, the soft humming of newly arrived birds peppering their conversation. Bill was telling her his post-graduation plans; it was still a full two years away, but he was already determined to take his shiny Ivy League law degree down to Arkansas and put it to good use.

"Do you think you'll ever run for office?" she asked.

"I've thought about it."

"You ought to," Hillary said with conviction. Then she chuckled, reaching out for his curly mane. She grazed a few unruly strands with her fingertips. "You'll need to lose this first, though."

Almost instinctively, Bill leaned over and placed his head on her shoulder. He couldn't explain it; it merely felt right. She accepted the gesture, scooting closer to him and stretching her own arm so it cupped the back of his shoulder blade, caressing the muscle. 

They were a perfect fit.

 


	2. Songbird

> _"To you, I'll give you the world,_
> 
> _To you, I'll never be cold,_
> 
> _Cause I feel that when I'm with you,_
> 
> _It's alright, I know it's right..._
> 
> _  
> _ _...And the songbirds keep singing, like they know the score,_
> 
> _And I love you, I love you, I love you,_
> 
> _Like never before..."_

_  
_ New Haven, Connecticut - Spring, 1971

Hillary's head rested against Bill's chest. The warmth of his bare skin pressed against her cheek, and by the angle of her ear she could hear the rhythmic thud of his heart. She could feel it, too, reverberating through her fingers as her hand splayed out across his upper torso. Their legs and limbs were tangled, and his arm was snaked securely about her waist. Hillary relished these moments in the afterward; those minutes of ecstasy in which she found herself unwound, her spine slackened and her breathing sedate. The pleasure lulled her, inducing sleep, and she was drifting towards unconsciousness when he spoke.

"Hill?" he whispered, his voice cutting through the night.

"Yes, darling." She kept her eyes closed, but tilted her face slightly to place a kiss beneath his collarbone.

Bill moved his hand up to stroke her hair, gently running his fingers through the locks. "I've been thinking about this summer."

"Mhm?" Hillary murmured, still half-asleep.

"I want to come with you," he announced. He shifted his hand again, letting it rest at the small of her back, finding a warm place in the inward crevice between her hip bones.

This statement was effective in rousing her. Hillary's eyes snapped open. "Wait, what?"

"I want to come with you, to California," Bill repeated.

Hillary sat up a little so that she was facing him. A heavy darkness engulfed the bedroom, illuminated only by slivers of blueish moonlight that seeped through the open curtain. She wasn't wearing her glasses and her blindness was only intensified by the blackness, but she could barely make out him out; his smile and the sheen of his blue eyes. "Are you serious?" she whispered, cradling the right side of his face with her hand.

"I am," he replied, and then he felt his stomach sink a little. "Unless you don't want me to."

A few days prior, Hillary had been accepted for a clerkship at a left leaning law firm in Oakland, California. The firm was small but notorious for its tackling of controversial cases and its liberal advocacy. Hillary had long admired its work with children's rights, which had become her concentration at Yale, and she was thrilled by the opportunity to intern there. He was ecstatic for her, but the news sealed the reality that they would be spending their summers apart. Bill had been recruited to spearhead the Southern campaign for George McGovern's upcoming presidential run, and with Hillary in Oakland, they had seemed destined to part ways.

But Bill feared losing her. Their relationship was new, especially perceptible to bumps along the road and the onslaught of tests that inevitably came with a separation, particularly one that would be a full three months. He had grappled with the situation for days, giving it plenty of thought. And he had come to a conclusion. He not only loved her - he needed her. Quickly, she had become his everyday: she was the early morning smile, the hand laced through his in the mid-afternoon, the goodnight kiss. It was a strange revelation for a man who had long prided himself on being independent. Early on in life, he had learned not to depend upon others. He had learned not to except much even from those who purportedly loved him the most: not to look to his mother when she dissolved into frantic tears, or to his stepfather when he was staggeringly drunk and miserably violent. He had learned to be his mother's keeper, his family's due north, and he had learned to not need anyone. Except now. Except Hillary. He _needed_ her; needed her like essential things, like air and water and sleep; he needed her, needed her brilliant mind, her warm embrace, her shoulder to rest his head upon. And so: at the end, giving up the McGovern job was not difficult, as long as it meant having her. 

"Don't be awful, of course I want you to," Hillary said resolutely, caressing his cheek with her thumb. Yet she knew how much Bill had looked forward to the McGovern job, the summer of campaigning, road tripping across the South to meet new people and explore new places. He was born for such experiences, and as much as she wanted him with her, she didn't want to deprive him. "But why do you want to give up something you love to follow me to California?"

The answer was easy. "For someone I love, that's why."

Hillary felt her heart surge. It was the first time that he'd said he loved her. She hadn't said it either, though she had felt it for a while now; she had feared it was too soon, too sudden. They had only been together about a month. She had felt herself falling, but ever even minded and rational, she hadn't let herself teeter too far over the edge. She'd reasoned and reckoned and finally convinced herself that it was just too early to have weight, that the conversations weren't yet more than banter and the sex wasn't yet more than casual. Now she knew what was true, in the depth of this sacrifice and in the genuineness with which he did it. It was her turn to take the plunge. "I love you, too," she confessed.

Beneath her, she felt him sigh and release the muscles in his stomach that had contracted. Hillary responded by wrapping one arm about his neck and entwining her other hand in his curls. Soft at first, then hungrily, she kissed him with the intention to pour out all the love that she had stoppered, to open up the dam and to let her love flow free and unbarred.

 

 

Berkeley, California - Summer, 1971

Berkeley was a college town, home to the University of California. It was nestled east of the the San Fransisco Bay and south of a Pacific Coast mountain range, just north of Oakland. Visually, it was stunning; the bay sparkled beneath the city lights, boasting magnificent blues and purples at nightfall, and the sky dwindled from blood orange to pink corals at both daybreak and dawn. And in the summer of '71, Berkeley was an enclave for the flower children, the hippies, the beatniks. They lolled about the city, in all its nooks and crannies: tanned golden by the sun, long hair festooned with daisies, bare feet dancing across the pavement.

Bill and Hillary found a decent flat for a cheap rent. Had they not been so young and in love, they would have thought it cramped: there was a kitchenette, a bedroom just wide enough for a mattress and a bathroom with an impossibly tight shower. But infatuation was a powerful salve, and so they thought the apartment's close quarters cozy. The domestic sciences were never quite Hillary's strong suit, but she made an effort, buying potted succulents for the window sills and bedsheets the color of ocean foam. Most nights they left their windows open, letting in cool breezes carried over from the Bay that smacked of sea salt.

Hillary spent most of her time working, but she had her spare moments, and Bill had plenty to fill them up with. All of his time was free, and he spent it exploring the area by foot, scoping out the best local watering holes and discovering quaint bookshops and antique stores. In the evenings, they'd go to small restaurants with checkered tablecloths, then take long walks beneath the stars or go out for a movie; typically the night would end with furious lovemaking and they'd both wind up in a sweat, tasting the salt on their lips. On the weekends, they'd go to North Beach, where they'd lie in the sand as he read aloud, usually poetry from Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ , or to San Francisco, where they'd jump impulsively off of cablecars and forge uphill strolls to peer in storefront windows.

Hillary decided on a whim one Saturday that she'd bake Bill a peach pie. She still didn't know all that much about Arkansas, or what people actually _did_ down there, but peach pie was one of those things she had decided, by association, was of the South. She dashed over to the market, and came home with a brown bag filled with fresh peaches, cream, and ingredients for a pie crust.

When Bill returned to the apartment, he found her standing at the counter with an open cookbook, furiously attacking a lump of dough with a rolling pin. Hillary wore faded jeans, a work shirt, no shoes. She was so engrossed in her battle with the dough that she had hardly noticed him walk in.

Bill embraced her from behind, wrapping his arms around her waist. "Hey," he murmured, nuzzling the inside of her neck to plant a kiss. "What's all this about?"

"I am baking a pie," she declared triumphantly, reaching back with her right arm to cup his face affectionately before returning to the dough. "A peach pie."

"A peach pie! My favorite," he said, moving his hand slightly to encircle her breast. "I didn't know you were a baker."

Hillary felt herself quiver under his touch, but resisted any oncoming urges and instead tried to focus on what was before her. "I'm a woman of many talents," she countered.

"I know," Bill mumbled into her ear. She'd buttoned her blouse lazily and he slipped his hand between a gap, making contact with the flesh that spilled from her bra.

She sensed herself arching into him somewhat, knowing she'd suppressed a groan. Mustering all her strength, she managed to straighten and swat at his hands. "Not now, later, later - I really wanna bake this for you."

Bill laughed a little, then relented. He released her from the clinch, but not before a playful squeeze. "Alright. I digress. I will wait - till after your culinary masterpiece."

"Now, I can't promise your mama's pie or anything," she warned, turning a page of the cookbook. "But I'll do my best."

An hour later, Hillary placed an entire pie and a bowl of cream before him. The presentation was a little sloppy; her latticework had uneven lines and crooked edges. But when he broke through the crust with his fork, it was brown and flaky, and the slippery, sugary peaches oozed beneath the surface. He took a bite with a dollop of the sweet cream, and it was delicious. Bill looked up at her; she'd been staring at him apprehensively.

"Well?"

"It's fantastic," Bill proclaimed. She smiled one of her enormous smiles, and he looped his arm about her to pull her onto his lap. "Try it yourself." He fed her a bite.

"It _is_  good," Hillary nodded appreciatively at her own work. "Good for a Chicago girl, anyways."

"Good for anybody," he corrected her. They finished off the rest of the slice, swapping bites from the same fork. Then Bill drew her in, hand settled at her nape. A smidgen of cream smeared the tip of her nose, and with a gentle tongue, he licked it away. She giggled. He leaned in for the kiss; her mouth still tasted of peaches and cream. With his free hand, he slowly began to undo the buttons on her blouse - languid movements by deft fingers, the tempo of a Southern summer. When he reached the hem of her shirt, Bill broke the kiss. She bent knowingly, sensitive to his intentions. With an open mouth, he gradually roamed the length of her neck, across her collarbone, downward to the juncture of her breasts; sketching constellations, hastened by her moans, hellbent on finishing what he had earlier started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the kind comments on my first chapter! This chapter is just my take on the earliest days of their relationship, that summer they spent together in CA. She really did bake him a peach pie, and he really did think it was quite good. ;)


	3. Gold Dust Woman

 

 

>   _"Rulers make bad lovers,_
> 
> _You'd better put your kingdom up for sale,_
> 
> _Up for sale..._
> 
> _  
> _ _...And well, did she make you cry,_
> 
> _Make you break down,_
> 
> _Shatter your illusions of love...?"_

_  
_ Washington, DC - Summer, 1974

Sara Ehrman believed she had a feminist intuition.  At fifty-five, her age placed her a whole generation behind the bright young things currently at the helm of the women's liberation movement, the twenty and thirty-somethings that had grown up on the Pill and scorched their bras. But Sara had always been ahead of her times; she'd been outspoken amongst the cocktail crowds of the 1950s, the stifling society circles where wives were puppets whose husbands pulled the strings, and it had won her the ire of many a man. She'd been the first in their social set to get a divorce, which had made her the subject of directed stares and whispers in the grocery store aisle until, finally, the next one get a divorce, and then the next, and the next - who knew if _any_ of those marriages had survived. Then she had set out to pursue a career, one that she was proud of; she'd worked her way up to a senior level congressional aide before the ERA was even introduced on the Senate floor. In 1972, she had gone South, to Austin, to help organize the McGovern campaign, and that's where she had first met Hillary Rodham. They'd lunched a few times on the trail, and Sara was taken by the girl, then not yet out of Yale Law, startlingly intelligent and effortlessly well spoken, and unfussy in appearance: large glasses, a brown wardrobe. Hillary validated Sara's long held feminist convictions, embodied the aspirations that she had harbored for American women all those years. And so when Hillary called her up early that summer, inquiring about places to stay in Washington, Sara was more than happy to sublet her own home to her. "The kids are gone," she'd told her. "You can stay with me. No cooking."

Hillary had moved into one of the guest bedrooms, and now it was a mess - the bed never made, floor strewn with books and clothes, even a bicycle propped up in the corner. In spite of her tenet's sloppy tendencies, Sara was glad she had extended the invitation to Hillary. They didn't always have much time to talk; Sara had a full time job and Hillary spent the day holed up in the Congressional Hotel, working for the Watergate impeachment committee. But there were occasional moments in between, at the kitchen table, in the car, sometimes on weekends, and Sara was continually in awe of the young woman. She was bright, very bright; a steel trap mind, Sara had decided, always thinking and always probing beyond the edifice. And she eluded a gravitas, a profound sense of direction for someone just twenty-six. Yes, Sara was perfectly certain: this girl would go places. Hillary Rodham was the future.

 

Sara sat at the kitchen table, the morning edition of _The Washington Post_ lying flat across the linoleum and a coffee mug in her hand.

"Good morning." She looked up. It was Hillary, staggering into the kitchen, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes and suppressing a yawn. She wore a heavy brown blazer, and a skirt to match that fell around her knees.

"Have some coffee, it'll wake you up." Sara gestured toward the pot of fresh brew. "We don't have that much time." Each morning, Sara dropped her off at the old Congressional Hotel on her way to work.

Hillary nodded, padding across the kitchen tile in stocking feet. She let a yawn escape from her mouth, then quickly concealed it with the back of her hand.

"Up late, looking at things?" Sara asked, still peering down at the paper.

Hillary made a sluggish sound in the affirmative as she poured a cup of coffee, then reached into the refrigerator for a yogurt.

"I understand," Sara replied. And she didn't doubt it. But Sara was also sure that she had been on the telephone late last night, almost certainly with her boyfriend, Bill Clinton. Bill was down in Arkansas running for the House of Representatives. Sara had met him in Austin, too, and while she thought him gorgeous and smart and dripping with Southern charm, she still felt it was Hillary who was destined for the brighter future. Hillary was head over heels for the boy, though, often praising him, once even offhandedly remarking that he'd be president one day. Sara sensed some strain in the relationship, however, and in recent days their phone conversations stretched late into the night as she worriedly paced the floor. It seemed logical enough: the distance, the weeks spent apart, the charisma of that boy. But Sara didn't want to pry, so she left the topic at that.

Hillary stood at the counter, alternating between big spoonfuls of yogurt and large sips of coffee. By the time she was finished with both, she was significantly more awake, and she hurriedly washed out her cup in the sink. "Just give me a minute to put my shoes on," she yelled, taking the stairs two at a time.

She returned a moment later in brown leather pumps with low heels and a satchel brimming with papers swung over her shoulder. Sara downed the rest of her coffee, then stood up. "Let's go."

They piled into Sara's Buick, and Hillary, now fully alert, was conversational. She pulled a cache of papers from her satchel and thumbed through them.

"Any luck with the subpoenas?"

"No," Hillary sighed, leafing through her papers. The most significant challenge being faced by the committee was getting Nixon to comply with subpoenas of recordings from the Oval Office, which more likely than not would be incriminating. He kept defaulting to his right to exercise Executive Privilege. "The brief is coming along, though."

"I'm glad," Sara replied. Hillary had been assigned to research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds for doing so.

"You know, the Johnson impeachment was ridiculous," she said, referencing the only prior impeachment of a president in US history. "Motivated by political reasons. Partisan. But this impeachment is so far from that - the charges here are really concrete. I have no doubt that if we get him to trial, he'll be removed from office."

"I agree. Unless he resigns."

"Would probably be smart at this point. Go out with some dignity."

"You should really be proud." Sara reached over and squeezed her arm, burgeoning with an almost maternal pride. "You're going to be a part of history."

Hillary smiled weakly. "I don't really know where to go from here, though. After all of this." She made a wide gesture to the mess of papers piled on her lap.

"You're the brightest girl I know. And with this experience under your belt, all kinds of opportunities will be knocking at your door," Sara bubbled. "You could practice for a few years, and then how about public office? I think you'd have a great shot. Stay in this area, maybe Maryland or Virginia. Or DC city council."

"Oh, I don't think so," Hillary said with almost a chuckle. "I don't really have the look for that. That's Bill's thing."

Sara bit her lip at the mention of his name. "Well, it can be your thing, too."

"I'm...a policy wonk, I guess," Hillary explained, searching for the words. "But there's another side to all of it - the visceral part, the sexiness. The sense of touch. The campaigning and the rolling your sleeves up kind of stuff. I love people, and I want to help people, but I always feel like people are never quite at ease around me. Maybe it's because I'm a woman." A touch of frustration laced her words. Then she exhaled. "Bill's great at that stuff, though. I mean, he's got both. He's brilliant, and he's dashing. People love him. He's really out there in the crowds, mingling, interacting with them..."

She trailed off. Sara quickly averted her glance to her, and there was a slight expression of agitation on her face, as if she'd remembered something. She didn't speak any further.

"Well, it's not easy for a woman," Sara conceded, her eyes returning to the road. "Maybe it'll get easier, someday. I think you're brilliant, and you dazzle me. And I think you could dazzle the crowds, too. It'll be tougher, because you're a woman. But what really matters is that you actually care, and I think that'll show. In the end, that's all that matters."

"Thank you, Sara." Hillary's tone was sincere. "I really appreciate it. I'm so grateful for you, for all the confidence you have in me. It means a lot."

"No need to thank me, honey; I'm just calling a spade a spade. You're gonna go far, Hillary. Don't let anyone stop you."

  

Hillary was furious.

Her days were long, and tedious. Sara would drop her off at the hotel early in the morning, and occasionally, she'd pick her up in the evenings, but often they weren't done until nine or ten at night, and she'd have to catch a ride with someone from the committee. When she was on the job, she was totally focused on the impeachment. Hillary had always prided herself on being able to compartmentalize her life, to separate the practical from the emotional; and so when she got to work, she refused to let anything - or anyone - compete for her concentration. But when she returned to her bedroom, all bets were off. Her mind would wander to Bill, and she'd let herself conjure up all kinds of horrible scenarios and excruciating thoughts, and the worst part of it all was she _knew_ she wasn't being delusional.

At first, she'd tried to chalk it up to just that: her imagination run amuck. It was reasonable; truly, this was the longest separation in their relationship. Since that moment in the law library three years ago, they'd hardly been apart. The summer after Berkeley, they'd moved into an apartment in New Haven together, which they'd shared for their final two years at Yale. In the summers and in winters, they'd traveled all over, always together: to Austin, for the McGovern campaign; to Mexico, for vacation; to London, where Bill had actually gotten down on one knee and proposed. She hadn't said no, exactly; just not yet. She still needed time. And he had understood, and hadn't pushed. Now, he was down in Arkansas, finally running for office. Hillary was thrilled. Since the very beginning, she had encouraged this, fully convinced of his potential to succeed in public life. She had long believed in the the miracles he could wrought by brandishing his powerful amalgam of magnetism, silver tongue, sharp intellect. She was proud.

But with him there, and her in Washington working on Watergate, they'd finally driven the wedge through their relationship: thousands of miles and an entire time zone. It was something that they had both avoided doing for years. The anxieties clouding Hillary were sporadic at first; a hollowness in her stomach when he didn't answer a late night call, or a heaviness in her chest when he seemed distant on the phone. She had tried to write them off. But then she spoke to Betsey, and everything snowballed. She wouldn't say anything explicit, but what she said was enough: the girls. Girls everywhere, in Fayetteville, in Little Rock, in the congressional district; U of A student volunteers, breathy little Southern belles; girls with tits, girls with miniskirts, girls with giggles. Bill was young, handsome, charismatic; an American prince, and so they flung themselves at him. They always had, and he was not much good at resisting, Hillary knew. She came to terms. It wasn't a question of _if_ , but who, and when, and where, and how many times. And it broke her.

She had never felt this way before. She was always strong, always confident, always self-assured. Little things did not break her heart. Most girls fell apart at the seams when pretty boys hurt them, but never Hillary. Not till now. The trouble with Bill was that he was _not_ just a pretty boy, and he hadn't been for quite a while. She loved him, and the reality that she could not trust him was jarring, exhausting, horrifying. It had shattered a part of her. Outwardly, she was a formidable bastion of courageousness, the woman that Sara predicted would one day bear the weight of the world on her shoulders; but internally, she had deteriorated into a sad little girl with a shriveled spirit. It was a strange paradox to live, an awkward line to straddle. And so she was absolutely furious. Furious that he was doing this, furious that she had let this man splinter her resolve, furious that, in spite of all this, she still wanted him.

Hillary eyed the phone. Tonight, she had told herself, she would do it. She would do it because she needed to be herself again. She would give it to him. She would say the unspoken. She wouldn't break up with him; no, she couldn't do quite do that to herself. But she'd risk it. She'd lay the cards out on the table, and he would say what he would have to say. She loved him, desperately, and she did not want to lose him. But she didn't want to lose herself, either.

 

On the third ring, she picked up. "Hello?"

It was him. "Hi, baby."

She almost smiled. That Southern lilt paired with a term of endearment was enough to melt her, when it came from him. But that realization alone fueled her with anger yet again, and she stayed the course. "Bill. We need to talk."

He fell silent for a moment. It further goaded her. He seemed to have anticipated this, which could only mean that he had done something which would warrant it. "Okay."

Hillary took a deep breath. Usually, she was unforgivingly blunt. Tonight, the words caught in her throat as the impending reality of what they would mean, spoken, seared into her. Finally, she opened her mouth and started off slow. "I've been talking to Betsy, and..." Her clench on the phone had turned her knuckle white. "I know what's going on, Bill."

"Hillary." His tone was meek.

"I know, okay?" Her voice shuddered slightly. She was a mess, and she knew it, and it only made her more incandescent. "The girls. I know."

Bill dissolved into a world salad, an almost incoherent mangle of nouns and verbs. "I - it doesn't mean - please, Hillary - not the way you think - I - I'm sorry -"

A crush of emotions barraged her. She wasn't even sure what she wanted him to say. She didn't want lies; to be pacified by gentle fibs, to be mended by blatant fabrications, would be an outright insult to her intelligence. Yet the truth was nauseating to swallow. Hillary felt the hot tears prick at her eyes, but she swatted them away before they could materialize, lest he hear her sob, and instead lashed out. Name calling. All the names in the book: asshole, bastard, sonofabitch. They were horrible, and delivering them via a scathing tongue was unfortunate succor. She leveled endless questions, the ones that had plagued her for weeks, an incessant spate of accusations. Sometimes she wanted the answers; other instances, she knew she couldn't bear them. She unfailingly kept up the assault, hurling words down the receiver, fearful of whatever vulnerabilities even a second of silence would disseminate.

All the while, he listened, occasionally attempting in a feeble voice to say her name, to plead a minute's pardon, but mostly remaining tacit - until she delivered, what, to her what just another volley in her endless stream of fury. "If you keep this up, I'll go to bed with someone here, and you see how you like it," she threatened, and he received it as a devastating blow.

Bill cut into her. What made her stop, finally, was the sound of his weeping. The throbbing sobs on the other end of the line jolted her, and her mouth fell shut. "Please, please Hillary, don't do that," he begged through the tears. "Please don't. Don't go and do something that will make life miserable for us both."

Tears were quietly streaming down Hillary's own face. She had a rebuttal at the ready, but she administered it with more sorrow than rage now. "So you can do it, and I can't?"

He was hoarse, cracking at parts, the intonations of a little boy. "Don't leave me. I need you."

Hillary hung her head. Softened, by a heart he'd wrenched in both past conduct and present pleas. "I don't want to," she admitted, barely above a whisper.

 

Bill knew he had blood on his hands.

And he despised himself for it. He often attempted to expunge the truth of the matter, in bravado and graceful oration, but without fail it always ended up staring him in the face, brought on by his own actions. He was a broken man; always had been. Composed of fragments and smithereens. Never whole. For all his robust build, he was easily fragile. Valiance was meager, and so quickly could he recede into the little boy that had attempted to wage tenacious battles against his abrasive stepfather, but never quite won. He would disintegrate. Hillary was the only one who could fix him; she was the spitfire of a woman who, for him, would get down on her hands and knees to pick up the pieces and put him all together and make it better again. But he was a broken man, and so he kept inflicting lacerations to her touch. Scars on her palms engendered by shards, his shards and pointed edges.

He was a man of weaknesses, endless weaknesses. He'd go hard at the flutter of eyelashes, the lingering brush, the smoldering gaze across a room. He would take the fall for dainty fingers that fondled his belt buckle, for blouses that split open at his caress, for just a few sordid minutes of flesh and pleasure, flesh and pleasure. And in Arkansas, the weaknesses were innumerable. They were blonde, busty, blue eyed, and they'd smile and wave and sink teeth into plump lower lips. Acted upon, they were bouts of independence, a peculiarly sick way of convincing himself that he did not need her, Hillary, body and soul.

But they were futile attempts, cheap shots at disguising reality. He loved Hillary. He loved her in that place with no space and time, just being and existing and loving. And he needed her, was prone to an insatiable demand for her. She had settled into his heart and had become indivisible from his own sense of being. He had to repair what he had destroyed, recklessly, for conquests that were, by comparison, so trivial. It would be difficult to make amends, because in order to truly rectify the devastation he had incurred, he would have to fix himself first, and he did not yet know how to do that. But he had to try.

And so, with the desperate ambitions of a broken man who knew that he was broken, Bill boarded the plane to Washington for the weekend.

 

Hillary had hardly let him touch her. She had allowed a chaste kiss on her cheek when they greeted one another, his lips barely skimming the skin before she pulled away and put him at arm's length. It was not an easy task; it had been a solid month since she had last seen him, and she had to repress an almost animalistic desire to launch herself into his arms. But she had to calculate her behaviors carefully, because she was still not sure, after days of consideration, how to react to him. Hillary knew that he had come up to Washington to placate her, and that only reminded her of his indiscretions. Yet, she could not help but be swayed by the gravity of the gesture, an entire weekend off of a grueling campaign schedule in order to make things right. So she was left somewhere in the middle, sustaining a tentative balancing act to defy any compulsions in favor of either extreme.

They were seated at a booth in a Chinese restaurant, and she snuck a peek at him over the top of her menu. Bill looked good. He looked the part of a public servant, clean shaven and outfitted in a navy blue suit. Once they'd been seated, he'd slipped off his jacket and rolled up the cuffs of his shirt, fully exposing his svelte wrists. She caught herself looking at his hands, at the finely tapered fingers she so revered. A juxtaposition of images struck her; first, the thought of where else those hands may have been and how they might have betrayed her, and then the memory of those hands on her, lovingly stroking every inch of bare skin.

A waiter came and collected both orders and menus, ridding Hillary of anything to effectively shield herself with. Bill smiled at her, folding his bottom lip into his front teeth.

"You look beautiful," he complimented with pronounced sincerity.

For the first time in weeks, she had put a certain degree of effort into her appearance, running a coat of red lipstick over her mouth and brushing her hair until it shone. She had donned a crisp white blouse, leaving open a few buttons at the neck. She was glad he was so appreciative of the endeavor, but considering the circumstances it was difficult to wholeheartedly accept any accolades bestowed upon her looks. Her thoughts momentarily drifted to those beauty queens down in Arkansas with honey colored curls and silky ivory necks. Shaking it off, she permitted herself to return the admiration. "Thank you. You look great, too."

There was a minute of intolerable silence, and it almost frightened Hillary. There had never been this space between them, not since she had closed it by walking the length of the law library. It was a deafening lull, equally distressing as the girls themselves. They had always been able to talk: anything and everything. She felt the raw ache throb at her, gnawing within her ribcage, and unable to cope any longer, she relapsed into words. They poured out, and a wash of relief fell over her. She spoke of Watergate, a topic of work and politics, always a safe space. Bill also seemed consoled by her abrupt termination of the solitude, and he listened attentively, then responded receptively. He extended suggestions, and they entertained soft arguments, the kind they were used to, an equitable matching of wits that had long borne the same pleasure for them as lovemaking or sweet talking. Soon, they were joking again, and he made a comment that spurred one of her uproarious, effervescent laughs, flashing the entire length of her neck as she threw her head back, open mouthed. When she looked back down, she saw him steal a glance at her neckline.

"Tell me about the campaign," Hillary offered, shifting.

She anticipated a sober reply, but instead he responded, "I miss you." Bill was staring at her in a direct manner, and she detected tears glinting in his eyes. "I wish you were down there with me."

"Really." She had not intended to be so dry, and after it was spoken, she felt faintly cruel. But she had thought of the girls yet again.

"Please." Bill stretched his arm out across the table and closed his hand over hers. It was a small motion, intended to be innocent, yet she quivered at his touch, at the join she'd been resisting. "I have never lied to you." His eyes were round, blue, wet.

Hillary paused, then nodded. Intuitively, her fingers rose to meet his, and they entwined.

"I am always trying to be better," he avowed, a handful of tears now trickling down his cheeks. "Be better for you. I need you like I haven't needed anything or anybody, ever. It's almost -- ridiculous, I guess." It came out a confession.

He lifted his free hand, a fist, to wipe the tears, but she beat him to it. She ran her fingers across the sides of his face, tenderly, lightly. "I need you like that, too," Hillary confided. "Believe that."

Bill squeezed her hand.

 

As soon as Hillary shut the door behind her, Bill drew her into his embrace. His arms wrapped around her fully, and she sunk into him. It was a long-awaited action, too long, and she pressed her palms against the width of his back, feeling. She settled her face into his neck, a familiar place, inhaling the cologne and the scent of aftershave. He held her impossibly tight, hands in motion as he stroked her hair, spine, the small of her back. He angled his face inward, depositing a trail of kisses behind her ear. Her hands flew upward, capturing his temples, and she brought his mouth to hers. The kiss promptly intensified as they battled one another for more; more contact, deeper, sooner. Stumbling, he backed her against the wall, and the sudden exposure to the cool surface startled a body that was now brimming with heat. They broke for air and gasped for big, hurried breaths. Her mouth was red, swollen, and his was smeared with her lipstick. She laced her hand through his mass of curls and stared into his blue eyes, admiring the stars, thinking about how he'd make it.

Bill's hands jumped to her neckline. He tore open her blouse, and she smirked with satisfaction, knowing that he had been thinking of doing this all through dinner. She wiggled out of her bra, and he buried his head in her chest. Her hand curled around his nape, tugging at the back of his neck to pull him in closer. Flinging her head back, she felt him nestled just beneath the beat of her heart. He caressed her with his mouth, and she unraveled under the ministrations. She bit down hard on her bottom lip, until she was nearly bleeding, to stifle the moan, so Sara wouldn't hear.

He got her. He always did. He was her soft spot, her Achilles heel, her tragic flaw. _This is it_ , she thought, tasting the hint of blood. _This is the way it is, and will always be._

  

In August, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency before the House could move to impeachment, and Hillary Rodham announced that she would move to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to be with her boyfriend Bill Clinton. Sara was horrified. She perceived an American tragedy: an astute, adept woman with immense promise effectively throwing away her future to be with a man. Sara offered to drive her down, dead set on changing Hillary's mind before they reached. "Hillary, for God's sake," she begged as the car rolled down Interstate 81, the scenery gradually flattening and the trees growing sparse. "He'll just be a country lawyer down there." As they wove through the Blue Ridge mountains, spending a night in a cheap Tennessee motel and purchasing tchotchkes from mom-and-pop shops just off the Mississippi river, Sara spared no argumentative logic: "Do you know what you're doing? You could get any job up there," and "He may not even have a career, may not even make a living," and, in a desperate last attempt, "Goddamnit, Hillary, you won't even find French bread down here!" Nothing worked. Each time, with a patient, polite resolve, Hillary would maintain, "I love him, and I want to be with him."

They arrived in Fayetteville, a sleepy town tucked behind the Ozarks, on a Saturday morning. Fayetteville was home to the University of Arkansas, and that morning marked the first football game of the school year, a rowdy season opener against the Texas Longhorns that drew merry making students into the streets, tipsy, faces painted red, boasting foam hats the shape of a hog's head. Alarmed by the lazy, decrepit surroundings, and having had her fill of the South, Sara bought a ticket for Washington, paid off someone to drive the Buick back, and begrudgingly bid Hillary goodbye.

On the plane home, she cried. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I finally got a little angsty here. A couple of different things inspired this chapter. One is that in Carl Bernstein's biography of Hillary, Woman in Charge, an observer recalls Bill breaking down in tears after Hillary made the exact threat to him that she makes here. Another is the perspectives of Sara Ehrman on both Hillary and the situation, which is really fleshed out in this great article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/us/politics/hillary-clinton-road-trip.html?_r=0.


	4. Dreams

 

> _"Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions,_
> 
> _I keep my visions to myself, it's only me,_
> 
> _Who wants to wrap around your dreams and,_
> 
> _Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?"_

_  
_ Fayetteville, Arkansas - October, 1975

The corners of Dorothy Rodham's mouth begged a frown. "Hillary. Are you kidding?"

Hillary stared blankly back at her mother, then slowly shook her head, _no._ She watched her let out an exasperated sigh, almost as if decrying her own naivety, before burying her face into her hands. "Well," she said. "That won't do. We'll just have to go to the mall right now."

Hillary's mouth contorted itself into a sideways grimace. "Mom, do we really have to? It's almost closing time--"

Dorothy slanted her eyes and shot her a threatening look. Knowing she'd effectively lost the argument before it had even begun, Hillary dropped her shoulders and made a motion of surrender. "Okay, okay," she conceded, grabbing the car keys off the counter. "Let's go."

The wedding was slapdash, and Hillary knew it. It was a strange irony considering that she had been putting off the event for nearly a full four years, but last Saturday she'd made the declaration that they'd get married within the week, and she was a woman of her word. That, too, had been spur of the moment. She had returned from a trip East, and Bill surprised her with the news that he had purchased a house she had earlier complimented offhandedly. "Now you have to marry me," he'd said, eyes dancing. "I can't live there by myself." It was a small brick house, just a thousand square feet, and bore all-American features: white shutters, trim lawn, a screen porch. They'd consummated it. Afterwards, when he was sprawled out on the carpet and she was straddling him, she'd leaned over, beckoned by his hand curving warmly about the small of her back, and whispered, "I'll marry you. This week. Here."

Hillary had never entertained notions of a fantasy wedding; even as a young girl she had been far too focused for that, slighting whatever she deemed frivolous in the least. And an extravagant wedding was just that. Theirs was hastily thrown together; they wanted a small service, and had only invited a select number to the ceremony. At the bequest of family, Hillary relented on a larger reception, but left the majority of the arrangements to a friend. They'd already eschewed a great deal of other conventions, foregoing an engagement ring and opting to phone guests rather than send out formal printed cards. Her attire for the day itself had only vaguely crossed her mind; she'd wear one of her office suits, she'd figured, but this would be one wedding protocol she would ultimately abide. Dorothy Rodham was not having otherwise: her daughter would be married in a gown.

They'd been barreling down the road, Hillary at the wheel. "You ought to be glad Virginia didn't catch wind of your wardrobe intentions," Dorothy cracked. There was amusement in her voice.

"Yeah, well. I'm not ever going to be quite what Virginia wants."

Bill's mother had shown up earlier in the day with her party of guests, appalled by what she discovered. The house wasn't quite in shape yet, and she'd stumbled across men still installing lighting fixtures in the living room while Hillary hurriedly wallpapering the foyer with Dorothy's assistance. Virginia took one glance at Hillary perched on a ladder with her hair in a knot and delivered the same disapproving glare she had given her the first the time they'd met in New Haven, years prior, when Hillary had wandered into Bill's house in a workman's shirt, feet stained by tar. Voicing her disdain, Virginia turned on her heel and left, checking her party into a hotel for the night. She made clear that she was as displeased with the wedding preparations as she was with the bride; Hillary knew that Virginia had always anticipated a simpering Southern belle for Bill's wife, and no less. Hillary did not even come close.

"But you're what Bill wants," Dorothy reminded her. And then, ever the voice of reason, she added, "Besides, what do you care about the opinions of a woman with a silver stripe in her hair? She looks like a skunk."

Hillary chuckled. "I'm gonna have to get along with her somehow."

"I doubt it's anything personal. It's a cultural thing; you're Chicago, she's Arkansas. Same with your father and Bill. Besides, mother-in-law woes come with the territory. Give it time." She patted her daughter's shoulder reassuringly.

Hillary turned the corner into the mall parking lot. Turning off the ignition, she managed one final, frail attempt in discouraging her mother's intentions, to which Dorothy's response was wordlessly stepping out of the car and slamming the passenger door behind her.

Once inside, she dragged her to the bridal section of Dillard's, the department store where Hillary had permitted a wedding registry for dinnerware. Sales clerks flocked around them, extending assistance in a consonance of thick twang, but Hillary made a beeline to the first rack she saw and plunged her hand in. Producing a dress, she announced to Dorothy, "This'll do."

Dorothy stepped forward and rolled her eyes. "That's not even your size," she retorted, snatching the hanger from Hillary.

Hillary exhaled, then fished through the dresses, sifting through tags until she came across the coveted number. She yanked it from the rack. "Okay. This is my size, and it'll do."

Her mother opened her mouth to protest, but then she paused, studying the gown. It was romantic, an ivory hue, swathed in Victorian lace at the neckline, forearms, hem. It bore a dramatic, high collar assuaged by an open neck that clinched at the bodice with a sepia brooch and a string knot. The waist was empire, and the sleeves billowed at the shoulders before narrowing at the elbows, running a fitted, feminine length. "Not bad," Dorothy admitted, reaching out to stroke the tatting.

  

Roger Clinton skillfully twisted the can opener about the beer's neck and pulled, cap catapulting at the hissing whistle.

"So, you're really gonna marry her. Hillary _Rod-damn_." It was a purposeful garble, intended to mock.

Bill frowned at his half-brother. They had had some variation of this conversation at least half a dozen times already, and he was not eager to rehash it the night before his wedding. "Roger."

"I didn't mean anything by it," Roger retorted defensively, feigning innocence. He ambled over to join him on the sofa and passed him a beer. "I mean, if you're sure this is what you want."

Bill groaned into the bottle, exhausted of the topic and exasperated upon the realization that they would, indeed, be thrashing it out again. Roger didn't much care for Hillary; never had, not since the first time Bill had brought her down to Hot Springs and he'd lain eyes on her Coke bottle glasses. He had, on several occasions, aired his whole litany of grievances toward Hillary, which ran the gamut from jabs on her appearance to what he decried as her "overly ambitious nature." Bill loved Roger, had spent much of their childhoods defending him from the wrath of his drunkard father; but he was still stupidly young, just nineteen, and did not quite have the foresight for anything more complex than a pair of tits. "Yes, Roger, this is what I want."

"I just can't understand it. She's so unlike the others, Bill," Roger sighed. The others, before and after: the conventional beauties, the concoctions of coiffed hair, acrylic fingernails, heavy lidded stares.  He partly meant it an insult, but also a genuine declaration of confusion.

"That's what I like about her." Bill took a lengthy sip. The more they debated this, the more he despised it. Bill had long maintained a heroic, cavalier demeanor around Roger that harkened back to his days as a premature knight in shining armor. To even begin to explain the full extent of what Hillary meant would tear down that gallant facade he had spent years nursing. His need for her was primal, almost childish, and admitting that to Roger would obliterate the carefully pieced illusion, one that was too late, too weighty to shirk now. All and all, it was a confession overly intimate, something that he had only managed to reveal to Hillary herself in the blackness of the night or in his most anguished moments. And it certainly felt like it would be a worthless disclosure spared on Roger, a boy whose imminent ambitions included lead vocals in a punk rock band and scoring with his Wednesday night date. Thus, whenever brought up, Bill found himself skimming the surface of the topic, never delving too deep for fear of revealing the naked truth.

"Mother can't understand it either," Roger went on, ignoring his reply. "You're breaking her heart, Billy."

Virginia harbored much of the same resentments toward Hillary that Roger did, if only taking the shape of slightly different arguments. She sought an ingenue for Bill, a delicate girl with subdued mannerisms and homey inclinations, a good housekeeper. And she had unflinchingly wanted a Southern girl, an archetypical belle with a honeysuckle drawl and chiclet teeth. Virginia thought Hillary too crass, too overbearing, and, worst of all, she opined, "a Yankee." Bill often tried to make the point that suburban Illinois was not exactly Manhattan incarnate, but such justifications were lost on Virginia, who thought her speech and behaviors exotic; "Chicago." She did not mean it a compliment, and Bill caught her more than once muttering "carpetbagger" under her breath.

"Listen." Bill set down the beer definitively. "I don't need to be married to a beauty queen or a sex goddess. I am going to be involved in hard work in politics and public service, and I need someone who is really ready to roll up their sleeves and work for me. I need someone who believes in the same things, who shares the same values as me. And for Christ's sake, I _love_ her. So I tell you this, for the last time: it's Hillary or nothing."

Roger looked back at him, deadpan. Then he shrugged his shoulders, nodded, and downed a swig of beer. "Alright, alright." He clapped his brother on the back, an appropriately masculine gesture of affection, then leaned in close enough for Bill to smell the alcohol on his breath. "So, is she aggressive in bed?"

  

They were wed on October the 11th, in the front room of their new home. Hillary wore the last minute acquisition from Dillard's and curls beget by multiple home permanent treatments; she was slightly blinded, having surrendered to the cosmetic extravagance of relinquishing her glasses for the day. Bill was startled by the sight of Hillary in the gown. The gauzy fabric clung gently to her tiny frame and she wafted across the room, a fresh current of wind on a spring day. The wispy frilliness of the dress somehow made her softer, smaller, almost a little girl again; her cheeks redder, and her posture practically unbridled. For all her mature, level-headed resolve, cloaked in her wedding gown and ringlets Hillary had never been so girlish, so innocent; a subconscious Cinderella, he thought, and chuckled. As she stepped toward him, crossing the foyer with her father on her arm, Bill had a flash of her bold strut down the length of the law library.

At the minister's inquiry, "Who shall give away this woman?", Hugh Rodham suddenly stiffened and maintained his grip on Hillary's forearm. "You can step back now, Mr. Rodham," the minister carefully prodded. It was not an deliberate occurrence - Hugh had simply frozen -  yet it undeniably seemed to symbolize the certain degree of friction permeating relations between the two families. A midwestern, Cadillac driving Republican cautiously giving away his daughter to a Southern Democrat; a pink lipped woman with painted eyebrows mourning the loss of a docile daughter-in-law to a headstrong feminist hellbent on retaining her maiden name. A blemish upon this strange marrying of Middle America and Deep South, ice and fire; it hung heavily in a small room crowded with twenty guests. Bill and Hillary faced inward, to one another.

Bill grinned at her as she looked up at him, and she reciprocated. Without the obstruction of the Coca Cola lenses, he could peer directly into her eyes, and he reveled in it; a rare luxury. Hillary, for her part, could not soak up the moment as sharply as she might have wished, but even without her glasses she could see how handsome he looked in his pinstripe suit and tie, an unruly curl falling over the edge of his face. She took his hand, faintly caressing his fingers and pressing her palm against the warmth. They exchanged vows and rings, fixedly gazing at one another to emulate the earliest days of the stares at Yale. It insulated the intimacy of the gesture from the rest, preserved the privacy of what transpired for themselves alone. They kissed as the audience applauded, and before breaking the clinch, Bill dipped his head to her ear and whispered, "I love you, _Hee-a-ree_. I'm in love with you."

In the aftermath of the ceremony, both felt giddily inebriated and wonderfully unsteady, high off a heady sensation of love and affection and excitement. They posed for photographs in the backyard, Hillary perching a step above him to match, perhaps even challenge his height; this was, after all, a marriage of equals. Bill steadied her with a firm arm about her waist, coming to rest at the outward swell of her hip. She clutched her bouquet, and they took liberal sips from his flute of champagne. In the lilac haze of the mid-afternoon, they fell into levity, laughing full throatily; she had never been so loose or so light, and her smile stretched impossibly wide, bearing all her teeth, the back of her throat. Overcome by a sudden wave of sobriety, she then straightened slightly and wrapped her arm around the width of his shoulder, casting an observant glance below. He stared back up at her, a reverent gaze, and for a beat they held still, considering the mutual dream. A characteristic confidence triumphed. Each sensed it in the other without the labor of words. Solidified by this sense of purpose, having somehow already carved a definite direction in what would be an uncharted course, they dissolved into mirth yet again.

  

 

Little Rock, Arkansas - Spring, 1979

They called him the boy governor.

 _Fitting_ , Hillary mused as she watched him from her seat. Bill had sunk into an armchair, legs crossed and hands upturned. He was flanked by guests on either side, state executives, serious looking men in gray with feathery mustaches and heavy spectacles; old men. They bent toward him, listening intensively, captivated by his conversation. Bill wore blue and expressively gesticulated as he spoke, his long, slender fingers emphasizing points of particular merit. His eyes sparkled easily and awry curls kissed his cheeks. He appeared, Hillary recalled, just as he had in Yale that first spring: a little boy.

The youngest governor Arkansas had ever had; and the youngest in the entire nation to boot, just thirty-two the day of election. She had never, even at the most grim instances of their personal relationship, expected any less. And there had been, still, her fair share of those. Apprehensions about women, other women, _most_ women, had nestled like a cancerous lump at the back of her brain. Nights she wondered where he'd been; women she wondered how he knew. Hillary had to remember things, to cope.  It was not easy. She had to remember the pride with which she regarded her boy governor, the feeling of his hands laced at the back of her neck before he made love to her, the promise that the marriage buoyed a critical destiny for them both. "All of this," Bill had once told her, "Is bigger than just us." A love. A rendezvous with fate. A vision. And so she remembered. 

They called _her_ Hillary Rodham, leaving a deliberate, awkward emphasis on her surname. _Rod-uhm_ , they'd say, in a blustery Southern accent, then in an obvious way stifle a chuckle. The public; the press; these men, currently crowded at Bill's feet. All of them. They did not know quite what to make of her, and she knew this. She did not fit into the prescribed parameters of what the First Lady of Arkansas should be; she'd kept her thick rimmed glasses, her drugstore permanents, her practical if not somewhat drab skirt suits and sweaters. And, to their ultimate chagrin, she had not neglected her professional ambitions in order to fulfill the ceremonial duties expected of a political spouse, but instead had kept her job at Rose Law, one of the country's oldest law firms and the most reputable in the state. It was, for Hillary, her own source of particular pride; she was Rose's first female litigator, and the month prior she had been elevated to partner status. She had worked at Rose for a full three years, all through Bill's term as attorney general, but the people of Arkansas had not paid much mind to the wife of the attorney general. They did, however, regard their First Lady with a severe scrutiny, and so they clucked their tongues and referred to her, dismissively, as "the lady lawyer."

The memory of Sara's impassioned warnings haunted her; how she had prophesied that Hillary would never truly fit with Arkansas, nor vice versa. All too often, her concerns seemed substantiated. Hillary would always be too sharp, too Chicago for Arkansas; and it would always be, no matter how long she stayed, somehow foreign to her. She would never really be one of theirs, and she would never know quite how to claim them as hers. Staring across the room at Bill, basking in the glow of those around him, Hillary could chalk up Arkansas as yet another offering. It was worth it. For him, she would always bite the bullet. 

At the end of the evening, the impossibly young Governor and his atypical First Lady escorted their guests to the door. They had lived there for nearly four months, yet the state mansion still struck Hillary as enormously cavernous, a sensation only amplified by the echo of their footsteps reverberating through the high ceilinged hallways. When they reached the entrance, they stood in the jamb, arms settled around each other's waists, and bid their good nights. "Good night, Governor. Good night, Miss _Rod-uhm_ ," one of the men said, nodding at them both, then making the purposeful show of suppressing a snicker. Feeling Bill's grip tighten around her, Hillary gritted her teeth and forced her smile.

  

Bill looked up from his reading and watched her trudge groggily from the master bathroom towards the bed. She collapsed on the comforter, inching beneath the covers with both eyes shut. He discarded the stack of papers on the nightstand and opened his arm to her. She crawled into the space, resting her head against his collarbone and spanning his chest with her arm. Hillary sighed, eyes still closed.

She hated the men. Hated the dinners. "Tired?"

A mumble in the affirmative. She let out a yawn, muffled by the fabric of his pajama shirt.

Bill switched off the lamp light. She began to lift her head, but he stopped her. "I'm too heavy," Hillary murmured.

He shushed her. "Go to sleep."

She did; within minutes, Bill heard the easy breathing of her slumber as her chest rose and fell against his side. She had always been good at that. It was almost a wonder, considering the constantly spinning cogs and wheels of her brain, so eager to parse any issue or topic when she was, at the very least, barely alert. A good night's sleep at the end of the day ought to be a mere miracle for a woman of her brilliance, and yet she proved to be more than capable of it. "I sleep on my worries," she'd once explained to him, and he was grateful for it.

But Bill often struggled to sleep, even though ordinarily he was so fatigued. It was a torturous habit; lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling, thousands of thoughts competing for attention.  _Not now,_ he'd beg, but no such luck. Tonight, he thought of the encounter in the doorway, of the state comptroller's rude parting and Hillary's stilted smile. Bill hated that smile. That smile was so different from her genuine one; tight lipped, rather than open mouthed - thin, rather than large. That smile dogged Bill, reminded him of the sacrifices she'd made at his expense thus far, and the ones she made regularly in her everyday interactions. He knew how Arkansas admonished its avant-garde First Lady, and there was little he could do to reconcile the people of the state he loved with the woman he loved. There was, for all her efforts to slacken her speech and embrace the contraction "y'all", a significant gap.

He felt that he was not worth it. Not worthy of her love, her compromises, her adoration; endless favors, ones that he feared he'd never be able to repay. He was still broken; he knew it. Bill mused on numerous occasions that she could've done better. Better men, that wouldn't have dragged her to backwater Arkansas or embattled her in bizarre cultural battles with people who didn't - couldn't - understand her. But she did not need men, and he often contemplated who she would have been without him. A senator or a governor, he was willing to wager. She was better than him: infinitely more composed, impenetrable self control, a keener mind. Bill could put on, but Hillary; Hillary was the authentic article. It still shocked him, sometimes, that she had agreed to all of it - him, his moral failings, his state of Arkansas - in the face of what would have been so much more. And yet, it was the marvel of his entire life that she had.

 _Pray that it's Hillary_ , he'd once written in a letter to Virginia. It had long been his only prayer. Winding his fingers through her hair and shutting his eyes in a desperate bid for sleep, Bill reckoned that it would always be. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, I tried to base this in some degree of authenticity, so a lot of what Bill says about her here to Roger & Virginia has been written about in biographies. I also tried to capture the feel of their wedding pictures in here because I've always found them pretty telling lol. I hope you all like it! This chapter will wrap up the 70's - next, on to the 80's ;)


	5. Over My Head

>   _"You can take me to paradise,_
> 
> _And then again you can be cold as ice,_
> 
> _I'm over my head,_
> 
> _Oh but it sure feels nice..."_

**  
** Little Rock, Arkansas - February, 1980

Bill's left hand splayed out across Hillary's stomach. Sentient heat emanated against his palm, a sensation he still found fantastically novel. He moved to caress the full length of the outward curve, from the rounded tip to the flattening at the bottom. She was nearly nine months along now; about as fully pregnant as she would ever be, and he savored the feel of it beneath his touch.

Hillary laughed. It bubbled from within her; a chirpy, happy laugh. Pregnancy suited her. "What, are you trying to _feel_ what gender the baby is?"

Bill chortled, wiggling his fingers playfully. "Now, please, I'm very perceptive."

"We _could_ have just asked at the sonogram, you know. Like normal people."

"I like surprises!" She rolled her eyes.

It didn't really matter. They had waited so long. Their fertility journey had been arduous, even cruel at moments, though both knew they were enjoying the far more fortunate outcome. The months just prior to receiving the desired news had been the most taxing, filled with copious visits to obstetricians, endless yielding to lab samples, frantic sex according to ovulation schedules and times marked by a calendar.  External pressures also abounded. Virginia wanted grand-babies and thought it ridiculous she'd had to wait five years already; unsolicited counsel hissed about the ticking biological clock. "Enough!" the doctor had eventually ordered. "Take a break. Relax. Make love to make love." And, coincidentally, that had ultimately been the formula. They'd spent a week vacationing in Bermuda, and Hillary had returned, blessedly and finally, pregnant.

Bill gave her rounded stomach one final, affectionate pat, then returned both hands to the book open before them. He drew the pencil to his mouth and contemplatively gnawed on the eraser's end. "Honest to God, Hillary, if this baby's a boy he'll have no name."

They'd pored over the blue edged pages of _The Official Book of Baby Names_ , a grocery aisle purchase, at least a thousand times, starring certain names, drawing curious circles about others. Nothing felt exactly right: it clashed with Clinton, or didn't quite settle in their mouths, or bore excessive resemblance to a family name, which they both decided was too much of a nuisance to even begin to venture in that direction. In fine Southern tradition, Virginia had named both of her sons after their respective fathers, but to her chagrin, Bill did not particularly seek to pass "William Jefferson" onto the third generation.

"It'll be a girl." Hillary leaned back against the sofa, resting her own hand on her belly in a definitive manner.

" _Now_ who's the perceptive one," Bill needled her.

She ignored his chiding, just smiled, stroking. "Chelsea," she stated, matter of-fact.

The prospect of a girl's name had never been a point of discussion. They had decided it a two full years prior - Christmas of 1978, to be exact. They had spent it in London, a city that had endeared itself to them since Bill had first proposed there the summer after graduating Yale. They'd strolled about its Chelsea neighborhood, hand in hand, peering into frosted store windows and admiring evergreen trees trimmed with ornaments, lights, and tinsel. They came upon a romantic antique bookstore and had stepped inside to run their fingers across the spines of wonderfully ancient, tattered old books. A record player perched on a table hummed the Judy Collins cover of the Joni Mitchell song, "Chelsea Morning," and Bill had sung along cheerfully. " _Pretty baby won't you wake up, it's a Chelsea morning_ ," he'd crooned in Hillary's ear, short breaths tickling the inside shell, provoking giggles. "If we ever have a daughter," Bill had then declared, "We should name her Chelsea."

And so it had remained the single forerunner for a girl, the one and only name heavily underlined in the pink paged section of the book. It paired well with Clinton, eliciting a dapper alliteration pleasing to the ear. But mostly it was a sentimental selection; the name in Hillary's mouth instantly rocketed Bill back to the dusky, dimly lit shop where they'd spent the entire evening digging through its treasure trove of offerings. Reminiscing, he sunk into the couch so their shoulders met and slipped his his hand beneath Hillary's. "I think you might be right."

They both felt the forceful kick of a small but feisty foot. Bill grinned. "Hi, Chelsea."

 

She arrived 11:24 pm, three weeks before schedule, a deep night in late February. Bill cajoled the hospital staff into allowing him in the operating room, insisting that even the sight of Hillary cut open from top to bottom wouldn't induce fainting on his part. His clout as the state governor loomed paramount, and they relented.

The baby was christened, as anticipated, Chelsea Victoria on the spot. She was placed pink and wriggling, ruddy faced and shrieking, into Hillary's arms. Her mother soothed her, cradling the small bundle to her breast, gently rocking her until she cooed. Bill nestled against her shoulder, finding the mere existence of the tiny infant, breathing and squirming and alive, surreal. "She's real," he breathed, as they counted newly born toes and fingers and massaged the fat, plushy flesh. "Hi Chelsea. Hi," Hillary whispered, carefully folding her pinky beneath Chelsea's twitching, teensy palm. Her daughter responded in kind, intuitively closing her mother's finger in her fist, cementing an impervious bond in just the first, few minutes of her life. Hillary's eyes glistened with tears.

"She's beautiful, she's beautiful." Bill was tantalized at his fatherhood realized, at the acknowledgement that he would begin to administer the particular parenting experience that he had been cheated of in his own life.  Momentarily, he tore his eyes away from the baby and glanced at Hillary; sweat laced her brow, strands of hair clinging stickily to the crown, but she gleamed under the harsh fluorescent lights in an ethereal way that stunned him, and he decided that he had never found his wife more beautiful. He pressed a shaky kiss to her temple.

Hillary looked up at him, her smile stretching impossibly wide to reveal a full set of teeth that nearly shone. "She's our girl, Bill," she sighed incredulously, as if she could not believe the words that had fallen from her own lips; struggling to fathom that they, two imperfect people joint in an imperfect union, had somehow borne something so perfect. "She's really ours."

For years, when their partnership weathered rough waters and soldiered through instances where even the love itself had seemed too vague, too undefinable, they'd clung to what they both could perceive as the most tangible: the destiny, the vision, the fate. The better future they'd engender together, for themselves and for others. But now, feeling the warm weight of Chelsea in their arms, she became the most palpable reminder of what they had forged, the most vital culmination of their travails, the most precious prize to be salvaged in the wake of their marital storms. The most important thing to remember.

 

 

Little Rock, Arkansas - Spring, 1982

Hillary balanced Chelsea against her hip and looked out at the crowd.

She was still adjusting. In the morning, she would drag herself out of bed, slip on her new self, and stare into the foggy bathroom mirror. She almost didn't know the girl who stared back; contact lenses in wide eyes, black eyelashes heavy with mascara, cheeks reddened by rouge. She still felt the ghost of the girl she'd exorcised. The absence of glasses on the bridge of her nose was weightier than the load they'd exuded when present, and the fitted wardrobe that carefully hugged her figure felt as if donning someone else's skin.

Bill was at the podium, pumping an exuberant fist in the air with each battling cry. The audience cheering now. An uproarious symphony, a salute in unison, the flutter of small flags waved.

They had not killed Hillary Rodham. Hillary Rodham hung in the shadows, hiding in closets, darting around corners. But she had to be kept away. Safe keeping. Safe, tightly tucked between the Hillary and the Clinton. "I shall forever be known as Hillary Rodham Clinton," she'd said. Crammed between the two, it was easier to forget the Rodham, made easier, still, by the effacing of any brand recgonition. No more ringlets from a box, or bulky spectacles, or thick brown skirts. Hillary Rodham Clinton was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Big blue eyes rimmed with an abundant layer of kohl, glossy chestnut hair curling at the behest of a defiant chin, whittled waist billowing out to the soft curve of feminine hips. Even Virginia had smiled. Had nodded, with approval.

Chelsea clutched a fistful of Hillary's hair in her small hand, tugging sweetly. She looked down at her daughter, smiled at her girl. Two years old, a cupid's mouth, golden curls silk to the touch, blue saucer eyes, all short limbs and ligaments. A smart girl.

He had not told her to do it. He would not be so blatantly cruel. But the year after losing his bid for reelection had been hell on the marriage. Sheer, unadulterated hell. In public, Bill would crack jokes. "The youngest ex-governor in the United States," he'd say, all pretty words and down home drawl. In private, he was shattered. So was she. Every argument was a large one. She pushed too fucking hard, he accused. "Only because I know what you're capable of!" she'd yelled in return. _Please, be softer, be sweeter._ Shouting and shouting. Slammed doors. More girls. Lost nights. Sex, but always angry, always with the intention to burn. There was passive aggression too, and it was almost worse than the knock down, drag out fights. Tossing Chelsea up into the air, catching her at the sound of her squeal, he'd riff the Tammy Wynette song, "Divorce." A chant of, "D-i-v-o-r-c-e, I want a d-i-v-o-r-c-e," as their daughter tittered in his lap. Just to rile her.

Hillary waved to the crowd. She gently took Chelsea's elfin wrist, sketched a wave on her behalf. They ate it up. How adorable. Bill looked back at her, to smile his little boy's grin.

He'd made mistakes, that first term. There had been plenty good reason to tax the car tags, but Americans hated taxes, plain and simple. The incident at Fort Chafee only added insult to injury. And so he'd made mistakes, and they'd voted in '80 with those mistakes in mind. But, as with successes, any failures incurred were dutifully divvied between Bill and Hillary, and she was told she'd made mistakes, too. Betsey had delivered the news, except it wasn't quite news to the woman who'd been scornfully regarded as the uppity lady lawyer, Miss  _Rod-uhm_ for two years. Betsey didn't like it any better than her; she'd trained her eyes to the floor as she spoke, twisted her fingers into knots, grimaced at parts. "The people of Arkansas want a First Lady," she'd blurted, and they all knew damn well Hillary Rodham had not been that.

The pop of photographer's flashbulbs now. Bill wove his arm around her shoulder, also waving, audience still hurrahing. A beautiful family. So beautiful. Bill beaming, Chelsea bouncing happily, Hillary still and lovely.

She knew politics, knew the wicked game of currying favor with constituents and charming the public. She knew the vision, knew the love, knew that all successes procured in their home were to be mutual ones. " _We_ get elected," Bill had once reminded her. And so Hillary had agreed. She licked her wounds, gathered her tongue in her cheek, and consented to the new name, the contacts, the cosmetics. A First Lady, finally. But Hillary Rodham had not died. She had sheltered her, painstakingly, lovingly, and still, she rose; rose at the tip of her tongue, with each pulse of her heart, simply occupying a prettier visage. _All the difference it makes._ Hillary Rodham was a survivor. If she had to assume Hillary Clinton, occasionally even Mrs. Bill Clinton, in order to prosper, to play the game, to get her chance at bat; well, she'd bite that bullet, too.

Hillary angled her face upward to look at Bill, at his round eyes and spry smile cast down at her. Oh, but how she loved him. For all the times he'd broken her heart, she loved him still. She had once been told, to her scorn, that she'd willingly throw herself onto a fire for him. _You are the love of my life. The light, the love._ She now knew that she had.

She kissed him. Fast, but deep. Sweet.

 

 

Little Rock, Arkansas - Winter, 1986

"Hillary Sue." Vince Foster kissed her, just grazing the corner of her mouth. Cheek soft to the lips, flushed red from the cold.

"Vincenzo," Hillary nodded at him with mock seriousness, the bogus Italian lilt punctuating her voice. Then she broke into a laugh, her large one, baring the ruby roof of her mouth and a flash of  tongue. Sliding into her seat and shedding her coat, she doled out her apologies. "Sorry I'm late. I got tied up with that last client."

"Typical," Webb Hubbell said from the opposite side of the table, hand resting in his chin, faking an accusatory tone.

"Well, _someone_ has to actually get some work done around here," Hillary retorted, matching his feigned derision pitch for pitch, then playfully swatting his forearm. She looked back at Vince, peering at him through a lock of hair, and winked. "Isn't that right, Vincenzo?"

Vince knew her smiles, her laughs, like the back of his own hand. He, Hubbell, and Hillary had been partners at Rose for years, cultivating a tight friendship in which she served as the crux. Vince had always been a quiet man; he looked the part, with his gentle expression, kind eyes, salt and pepper hair. Shy and introverted, he drew into himself easily. Before Hillary had arrived at Rose, he'd enjoyed a pleasant working relationship with Hubbell, an affable, former U of A quarterback with a stocky build and loud chortle, but the two men had never bonded much more than the occasional office lunch spent bent over legal pads, nibbling on sandwiches. Hillary's arrival had changed all that. She'd descended upon them the spring of '76, unapologetically outspoken and recklessly modern and bafflingly brilliant. And funny, with an open laugh and eyes that danced when amused. Unlike any woman he, or Hubbell, had ever seen.

Something had prompted a memory. Hubbell and Hillary were reminiscing now, hands wrapped around wine glasses filled by the carafe of red liquid at the center of the table. Hillary's neck was thrown back, exposing the full white column from the hollow of her throat to the thick fabric at her neckline. Hubbell was laughing, tears springing to his eyes, fist banging the checkered tablecloth. "Remember, Vince?" Hubbell called out. "The Ludwig case? Remember?"

Vince smiled. He did remember. The year after Hillary had been made partner, the summer after Chelsea was born. They'd travelled to New York City to depose Daniel Ludwig, the richest man in the world, a shipping magnate in his eccentric eighties and impossibly cantankerous. Vince and Hubbell had prodded Hillary to take the initiative at the meeting; "He's an old man, hormones, you'll have the advantage," Hubbell had said, wheedling. "Neanderthals!" Hillary had mock scolded, and then she'd agreed. Ludwig was brought in on the arms of nurses, laid upon a sofa, all wrinkled skin and jutting bones, sipping a milkshake with a straw as Hillary spoke. She'd asked him if he'd ever been sued for breach of contract. Finally looking up from his drink, the old man had asked, "By breach of promise, do you mean you want to talk about sex?" Without missing a beat, putting on a sugary Southern drawl and dragging out her syllables like molasses, she'd countered, "Sure. If you want to talk about sex, I'll talk about sex." Ludwig had bolted up, ogling her. "What kind of sex?" His lawyers immediately jumped in, called for a break, afterwards advising Hillary to, "not excite Dr. Ludwig again." The three of them had burst onto Madison Avenue at the meeting's conclusion, doubling over with laughter, gasping for air, clinging to one another for composure, only to dissolve into gaiety yet again when recalling the old man's innuendo.

" _If you want to talk about sex, I'll talk about sex._ " Hubbell wiped his tears with a fist.

"Stop, stop," Hillary managed, hand on the base of her throat as if to still the laughter.

They'd known her when she was Hillary Rodham; around them, she still felt like Hillary Rodham, despite the tailored suits and lipstick and slimmed ankles. Hillary Rodham had caused a stir at Rose. Vince recalled firm executives pestering him and Hubbell to talk to Hillary about her appearance, a task neither man was willing to undertake. They were furious the Fridays they found her wearing jeans, though they had no particular rebuke for male employees in golf shorts or cutoffs; and even in her most lawyerly attire she was not soft or sweet enough to meet their decidedly Southern standards. At office parties, their wives would balk at her; they'd laughed at her hair, her clothes, her Midwestern accent. Vince sensed that deep down they envied her, her forthrightness and her drive. But they could hardly admit it. Including Lisa.

Lisa had long been suspicious of his relationship with Hillary, despite Vince's countless reassurances to her that they were no more than good friends. The lunches that the three shared at the Villa were routine now, but the first time they had done so garnered considerable attention in Little Rock. Vince had returned home that day to Lisa irate, having been phoned with the news that he'd been out dining with another woman. She had been wary of Hillary ever since; more so incensed by the realization that there was plenty Vince discussed with Hillary that never crossed his mind to tell her. It was office talk, he'd tried to explain to no avail, and so Lisa still regarded Hillary with teeth clenched.

Vince studied Hillary in the seat next to him, admiring her pretty profile and the characteristic conviction with which she spoke even in light moments; he thought of the profundity etched in her eyes when she was serious, and the guttural sound of her laughter. He remembered the office party when, ever so tipsy, she'd leaned toward him in a confessional way and said, "You know, you're Atticus Finch."  And then, too, he remembered the occasions where she'd openly adored Bill Clinton with an abandon untypical of her, bantering about what she believed was his inevitable presidency, lavishing his name and accomplishments with endless praise. The instances she'd divulged girlish memories of the first spring at Yale, the sweetness with which she spared smiles in his direction. "Hopelessly, madly in love with Bill Clinton," Hubbell had mused the morning after he lost his reelection bid, when they'd gone to pay condolences at the mansion and found her clinging to his waist, eyes red, face stained by tears. Vince knew about about the transgressions. He knew Clinton's well documented penchant for candy floss blondes with pasted on smiles and heaving chests. It was a peculiar paradox to bear witness to; the vivaciousness of the girl, so in love with the boy, who was so inclined to break her heart. Vince liked Bill Clinton. Yet, for all his goddamn rationalizations, he could not understand why the bastard did what he did.

"Penny for your thoughts, Vince?" Hillary looked over at him, large blue eyes blinking, having perceived he'd zoned out.

"Oh, nothing." He smiled, and lightly touched her arm. "Nothing."

 

"We are going to wash off the dirt of today," Hillary recited, tucking the comforter around her daughter's small frame. "And then, tomorrow will be a new day -"

"And we will stand up strong," Chelsea finished, spirals of blonde curls fanned out on her pillow, smiling up at her. _My smile_ , Hillary thought.

"Good night, sweetheart." She bent to place a kiss on her forehead.

"Good night, mommy."

Hillary switched off the light and quietly shut the door behind her. She walked the length of the hallway to the master suite. Her nightly mantra with Chelsea was one they'd practiced since she was an infant, and sometimes she thought it as much a reminder for own self as for her six year old daughter.

In the bedroom, she plopped down on the bed and kicked off her low pumps, liberated toes wiggling gleefully at the release. She stretched out her legs and the nylon stockings unfurled like a second skin, landing in a pile at her feet. She peeled off her blouse, blazer, and skirt, discarding clothes until she was left in her underthings, and then padded to the bathroom, the soles of her feet startled by the cold surface of the tile. Shivering, she paused and caught her reflection in the mirror. Dark hair brushed her shoulders, tips resting at the pale, firm collarbone. She was skinnier now than she'd ever been. She ran her hand across her ribs, the curve of her hip, tracing the cesarean scar, sucking her breath in so her stomach was flat against her palm. _He fucks around, Hillary._ She exhaled. _I know._

Suddenly, he appeared in the reflection behind her, still in his suit bottoms but no jacket, sleeves rolled up and tie hanging unravelled about his neck. Red cheeks, thick hair, staring. She hadn't known he'd returned home. He bit his bottom lip and walked toward her. "Hey."

Hillary turned to face him, masked her thoughts with a smile. "How was your day?"

Bill gave her cheek a sloppy kiss, pressing into her side. "It was good, but," his voice dropping low, "Do you really want to talk about that?" He pinched her playfully, plucking at the flesh of her hip, leaving the skin pink, sensitive. 

Freezing minutes prior, the bathroom now felt hot, very hot. It stifled her, and she sought deliverance. Shutting out the rest, she looked at him through slanted eyes, mischievous eyes, and drew a fingernail into her mouth, gnawing softly. "Well..."

Bill gathered her into his arms, like a bride. He carried her over the threshold of the bathroom and they stumbled back into the bedroom, collapsing on the bed with a thump, legs and limbs tangled, kissing, hands grasping. His fingers pulled impatiently at the lacy fabric of her bra, at the hard ribbon of underwire, one hand undoing the hook and the other dragging down her sternum, eliciting a gasp. "You're beautiful," he murmured into her ear, breath hot, labored.

 _Where do you go._ Hillary shut her eyes, digging her fingernails into his back, deep enough to feel the torrid flesh against her beds. Deep enough to obliterate the brooding. _But_   _you always come back. You always come back._

 

 

Little Rock, Arkansas - Summer, 1987   


In late spring, Arkansas began its annual descent into the harsh humidity of a Southern summer, cicadas swarming hickory trees and sidewalks sizzling beneath a glaring sun, air heavy with anticipation. A presidential run in '88. The idea manifested gently, then overtook the residents of the governor's mansion with unbridled fervor, and as May melted into June, it gained remarkable momentum. "This is it, this our moment, finally," Hillary had nearly wept, lacing her fingers through his, smiling all teeth, tongue, and throat. Bill felt it, too.

By early summer, countless analysts had holed up in their offices, crunching numbers, measuring the economy, weighing favor with the electorate, gauging the domestic climate. The chances were good, they'd said; Bill governed a state without much national prominence, but he'd been able to effectively widen his own exposure in recent years by giving the Democratic response to Reagan's State of the Union and by serving as the chair of the National Governor's Committee. With each confident sentiment, Bill and Hillary's spirits were further invigorated. "I think you're right, baby," he'd whispered late June, pulling his hands through her hair and kissing her forehead. "This is it."

Then, Betsey swung down the ax.

In her house on Hill Street, she sat him down. Perched at the desk, she made her fingers into a steeple, inhaling sharply, brow fuddled as if suffering a migraine. Finally, Betsey looked up, stroking the sheet before her, and stared into his eyes. "Okay," her tone was tempered, the stance of a stern schoolteacher. "I have a list of names. Women's names. I'm going to read them off, and you just tell me if you fucked them. Yes or no."

Bill's mouth fell open. "Betsey-"

She cut into him, words as frigid as ice. "No, Bill. We cannot. We just can't. Not after Gary Hart."

He hung his shoulders, posture falling into a slump, and looked down at the ground.

Betsey began to rattle off the list, boring on him relentlessly, raising her voice until it effectively prompted a reaction on his part, a weak nod or a fervent shake of the head. Disgusted. Appalled. She peppered him with follow up questions, slicing through his soul as she demanded the answers. _How often? Where is she now? Did you go to her apartment?_ And, most importantly, _Will she talk?_

By the end, Bill's head was in his hands, the veins erect.   _  
_

"This is too much, Bill." Betsey sighed, raking her hand through her crop of gray hair. "I warned you. On the heels of the Hart thing, the press is gonna be out like vultures. You cannot run this time."

"Now, Betsey," Bill straightened, mildly attempting to level with her. He employed hand motions, in full political mode. A reckoning. "I don't think there's all that much to come out, honestly, I don't think all that many people know. I think we can still go forward-"

"Bill! It will be political suicide right now!" Betsey waved her arms. "For fuck's sake. We both know goddamn well that there's a lot of potential here, but if you run now, right after Hart, and just _one_ of these women come out - it's a domino effect. A fucking bimbo explosion. That's it. You're destroyed. You won't be able to salvage it. You just need to sit on your hands, and wait."

He ran his forefinger across his lower lip. Thinking. 

"Hillary and Chelsea." Her words quivered, and they shot through him like knives. The blood roared in his ears. She shut her eyes and went on. "I don't care what comes out. Fuck, I don't even care what happens to _you._ But it's going to be bad for them, Bill. It's going to humiliate them.  In front of the whole fucking country."

Bill nodded, slowly, and then more vigorously. "Okay," he said, yanking at his tie, feeling it tighten about his neck. Like a noose. "Okay. You're right." 

Then he doubled over and let out a sob.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this chapter was a little long winded lol so I apologize for that, there's just so much I wanted to fit in here! I included the lunch with Webb Hubbell & Vince Foster because I think their friendship was fascinating, a way for her to still be free and cut loose so to speak. The anecdotes in that section are lifted straight out of Hubbell's book and I found them fun so I decided to stick them in here. Hope you all like it!


	6. Don't Stop

> _"Don't stop, thinking about tomorrow_
> 
> _Don't stop, it'll soon be here,_
> 
> _Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone,_
> 
> _Why not think about times to come..."_

_  
_ Boston, Massachusetts - January, 1992

"Who is Gennifer Flowers?"

Hillary's jaw was set. In the past twenty-four hours, she had attempted countless calming mantras and allegedly soothing breathing techniques to quell the storm. By the time she was seated in the stiff sofa, shoulders just touching Bill's, she had felt a strange calm descend over her. But then the hot, glaring light came crashing down from overhead, triggering a startling sound akin to an artillery round, a blaze of luminescence and heat as it shattered. Barely missing her head. He'd yanked her onto his lap in the nick of time, pulling his arms around her tightly, pressing kisses to the top of her head, body quivering as much as hers.  Hands running up through her hair, caressing the places where she'd have been burned, muttering over and over, "I love you. I got you. I love you." Bill had rescued her from being scorched alive, and now it was her turn to rescue him from himself.

But any semblance of a relaxed disposition was vanquished by the incident, and as the interview commenced Hillary could feel the painful clench of contracted toes, the sharpness of fingernails baring into her palm.  "How do you know her? How would you describe your relationship?" Kroft was asking now. She turned to look at Bill, who was faring better outwardly, giving an impression of composure.

"Very limited, but until this, you know, friendly but limited." Bill began fleshing out the brief synopsis they'd prepared on Gennifer, his account of how they'd met, what the extent of the relationship had been. _No more than ten minutes in ten years._ A good line.

"Does your wife know her?" He cut in.

"Oh, sure." Hillary faced Kroft again, nodding, making her best effort to feign nonchalance. She was in full makeup, long blonde hair fixed with a black headband. Her suit was a becoming shade of green, and the large gold baubles fastened to her ears glistened glamorously. Yet she could sense her anxiety seeping through piercing blue eyes in a way she knew was penetrating, and futilely she tried slackening her facial muscles to appear softer, sweeter. Later on, the campaign staffers would tell her she'd looked beautiful, but like an iceberg, detached and frigid and all sharp edges.

"She is alleging," Kroft went on, "And has described in some detail in the supermarket tabloid what she calls a twelve year affair with you."

"That allegation is false." She gave a purposeful nod, to meet the conviction of his statement.

When the story blew up, Hillary had raked the coals over him. She did know Gennifer; yet she had known plenty of the others, too, and she also knew, knew _too fucking well_ , that there was always some degree of plausibility to any claim when it came to her husband. But he'd denied it, over and over; to her, to all the others on the campaign, to the entirety of the damage control team, including Betsey. He poked holes in Gennifer's account, victoriously flaunted the dates and dalliances that were provably absurd, belabored the fact that she'd been paid a hefty sum for the story. "Have I ever lied to you?" he'd finally pleaded in that cramped New Hampshire hotel room, staring straight into her eyes, the words taking her right back to 1973. _Well, not exactly,_ she'd thought. He hedged sometimes, stumbled around making outright confessions, often just short of coming clean, but he usually ended up dissolving into a fit of sobs and apologies that stipulated guilt. Not this time.

And so, somehow, she managed to believe him.

They plodded through the interview. He categorically denied the affair. Hillary regurgitated the Gennifer points they'd all decided on throughout the course of the week. _These poor women. It's the economy, it's the recession. They had just been minding their own business, and they got hit by a meteor._ Bill's arm shifted over hers at moments, settling comfortably, a familiar weight.

Then Kroft's questioning took a broader turn. Marital infidelity. _What a topic._

"Are you prepared to say tonight that you've _never_ had an extramarital affair?"

They'd known, of course, that the question would arise. Rumors had been swirling already, festering off of what had plagued them in Arkansas for the past decade, though there hadn't been any substantial proof or out-and-out expose until Gennifer. Just whispers, gossip exchanged between huddled shoulders. Now the flood-gates had opened. A bimbo explosion, as Betsey called it. Girls, girls, girls. Hillary thought of them all, the ones she'd seen, their faces etched into her mind, beauty queen blonde coiffures, hips swaying in dresses tight like bandages, lips open and wet. For her husband.

She angled herself toward him again as Bill started to answer the question. He danced around it, just as they'd planned. "I'm not prepared to say that about anybody," his voice calm, cool. He stressed the privacy invasion, emphasized that no married couple would be comfortable spilling every dirty detail of their marriage on national television. It was the best strategy they had. They'd all decided that he could not make a flat denial of the charge. Not with all these girls tip toeing around, threatening to emerge from the shadows, capable of laying bare the sordid truth. _Girls, girls, girls. Fuck, fuck, fuck._

"I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage."

 _Pain in the marriage._ That was the most suitable term they'd conjured up the evening prior, George with his head buried in his hands, Dee Dee gnawing on her bottom lip, Betsey fuming, fists balled up. A euphemism. An insinuation, couched with forgiving words, that demanded the consideration of human error without eliciting the explicit imagery of sex, and scandal, and sex. Pain in the marriage, like a BandAid pasted over an old, old wound. Pain in the marriage, the pain being all her suffering, the pain he'd wedged like bullets into her chest, especially in '89, right after he fucking avowed to set himself straight, to sit on his hands like he'd been told, to clear the way for this presidential run. The worst in '89, when he'd almost wanted out because of that soft, soft Arkansas divorcee with creamy thighs and a swan neck and a quiet laugh, like the tinkle of bells. When he came back to her in '90, it was on his hands and knees, groveling. _Baby, please, you're the one. I love you. I love you._ That had been the most painful. That one.

"There isn't a person watching this who would feel comfortable sitting on this couch detailing everything that went on in their life or marriage. And I think it's real dangerous in this country if we don't have a zone of privacy," Hillary offered, picturing the zone of privacy, like a shield, like walls. For all her agony, she meant it; Bill's indiscretions and transgressions were her crosses to bear. She tended the wounds and applied succor to the injuries. But she did not feel it the concern of all Americans, especially in light of the _real_ issues. There were kids who went to bed hungry and single mothers with no jobs. Workers laid off and a grappling middle class. Inevitability, juxtaposed with all that, the girls, some consensual fucking around, seemed trivial by comparison, and she once again fixated on the vision. Bill could help. He could do so much. They could do so much. If only he didn't sabotage himself, _every_ _single fucking_   _time_.

"I think most Americans would agree that it's very admirable you've stayed together," Kroft said. "That you've worked your problems out, and that you've seemed to reach some sort of understanding and arrangement-"

_Arrangement._

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute." Bill draped his arm over her lap, a protective gesture, urgency in his voice to conceal the fury. She let out an irritated laugh. A scoff. "This is not an arrangement, or an understanding. This is a marriage. That's a very different thing." Stressing the syllables, punctuating the words with sincerity.

That was what people really could not wrap their heads around. The girls, and his wife. If he couldn't keep his hands to himself, then it seemed logical enough that had no desire to put his hands on her. A marriage of convenience, to placate their mutual political ambitions and to quench an insatiable thirst for power. Like the king of England, wed to the queen of Spain. _Fuck. That._ They didn't know. They didn't know how he trembled in her arms, how his hand crawled up her skirt to press into her upper thigh, how he sunk tender teeth into the flesh of her shoulder. How he kissed the tip of her nose, and wove his hands through her hair, kneading the silk between the forefinger and pad of his thumb. How he always, always came back to her.

Hillary felt the anger pent up like a coil, defense mechanisms springing to her, weapons at her disposal. "You know, I'm not sitting here," she declared, straining to keep her voice even, all while the words lashed out like a whip, "Some little woman, standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he's been through, and what we've been through together." Bill stuck his lip out in pride, pride for her, his girl. Took her hand, clasped it between his, hung on firmly. "And you know, if that's not enough for people, then, heck, don't vote for him."

She'd always hated that fucking song. _You'll have bad times, and he'll have good times, doing things you can't understand,_ Tammy crooned all over the radio stations in Arkansas. They'd played it at a party once, when she and Bill were slow dancing, and she'd pushed away from him suddenly, the lyrics too accusatory, too stinging to endure in his arms.  _Stand by your man. Show the world you love him._

"You came here to try to put it behind you. Do you think you've succeeded?"

"I think that's up to the American people," Bill said, folding her arm beneath his, tangling her in his grasp. She clung to his forearm, focused on him as he spoke. "And to some extent, the press. This will test the character of the press. It's not only my character that has been tested."

 

The interview aired that evening, Superbowl Sunday, chopped up to fit into the last ten minutes just before the football game. They'd edited severely, jumpy at parts, but the one portion that was presented in its unabashed entirety was the "stand by your man" comment. It was to be Hillary's formal introduction to the American public. The press jumped at the sound bite, dangled it to the starving masses on the the evening news programs and the early morning show circuit. People swallowed it by the mouthful, and the irate turned out in droves to unleash a backlash. "Tammy's madder than hell," Wynette's husband informed _USA Today,_ adding fuel to the fire. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her power suit and headband, snooty and impervious and slandering the anthem of American womanhood.

But in the end, it saved him. She saved his candidacy. She crucified herself, torched her reputation, and he ascended from the flames. The poll numbers climbed back up, and he managed a come from behind second place performance in the New Hampshire primary. "The comeback kid," he dubbed himself at the rally that night. Hillary, standing by, sacrificial lamb, adoration still sparkling in her eyes.

 

 

New York, New York - July, 1992

Hillary tugged at the hem of her beige suit, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. She peered into the mirror and observed. She'd cut her hair. The public relations analysts said that the longer style she'd sported in the primary season reminded people too much of a Southern Republican. It was shorter now, falling to her chin, and she had bangs, stylishly combed over her forehead. She didn't wear headbands much anymore, either; the practical, efficient accessory had been a staple of her wardrobe for years, but she was told it gave off a cursory appearance unbecoming to the wife of the soon-to-be Democratic nominee.

When she opened her mouth, it was out on the AP wire within thirteen minutes. If they caught her off guard or she gaffed even a sentence, it was diced up by the press and delivered to the public on a silver tray for consumption.  _I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas._  They called her a Rorschach test, an inkblot absorbing the projections of others. A modern, American woman, or a shrill harpy with a big mouth. _You decide._ She chuckled softly. It was almost Arkansas all over again. She heard them refer to it as "the Hillary problem" in hushed tones on the plane, consulting with one another over the bevy of corrections to be made. The hair and headbands had just been starters. _Be cautious. Be sweeter. Be softer. Just smile._ And she knew. She knew all too well.

"Mrs. Clinton? The car is here." A staffer, through the door.

"Just a second," Hillary called, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear and giving the front of her suit a final pat. She squared her shoulders, opened the door and stepped out.

They walked down to the car together, the three of them hand in hand, Chelsea in the middle. She wore a polka dot pinafore, her mass of unruly blonde curls tumbling down her back. Hillary looked at their daughter and smiled, squeezed her hand. On the campaign trail there seemed to be an endless litany of worries, from the top of the hour to each waking minute, but Hillary never forgot that Chelsea was her paramount concern. She was twelve, kind, intelligent, braces in her teeth and curious questions at the tip of tongue. The campaign was grueling for a child; since the early Arkansas years, they'd done their best to explain to her the intricacies of her father's job and how to cope with the funny things she might hear spoken about Daddy. But a national campaign was entirely new territory, infinitely more cutthroat and brutal. Chelsea was absolutely off limits to the press, they'd both declared resolutely, a stalwart measure to protect her. Hillary intended to keep it that way if they won the election, too. She longed to fashion an artificial bubble of normalcy for her daughter. To preserve an unfettered childhood to whatever degree she was able.

Hillary sat across from Bill in the car, stretching her legs out so the rounded toes of her heels met the tops of his shoes. He was bent over his acceptance speech, head angled carefully toward the paper, brushing his lip as he scanned the page. They had worked on the speech late into the night, making off the cuff changes and rephrasing certain sentences until the text was blurry to their sleepy eyes. She watched as he leafed through the packet with his long, nimble fingers. She remembered the early days at Yale; how she'd relished staring at his hands while he turned the pages of a book, how in bursts of affection she'd kissed the inward arch of his wrist, skimmed the tips of his fingers against her mouth. They had come so far since then. She could map out the memories, trace the winding path they'd forged, look over her shoulder and see, still, the shining face of a boy in a law library on a spring evening.

Bill looked up at her.

"I'm so proud of you," she said.

 

The arena at Madison Square Garden thundered with cheers and applause, the tumult reverberating through the floor beneath their feet. Each delegation waved American flags and Clinton banners, a ripple of white sails as far as Hillary's eye could see, flush against a pastiche of stars and stripes. The rapport was electrifying; Bill's words easily prompted an eruption within the crowd, and they carried on with arms outstretched into the air, his name on their lips again and again. Tears pricked at Hillary's eyes, the thick pounding of her heart in her chest. She clamped down on her bottom lip at a desperate attempt to maintain composure, pride spilling from her pores, shooting out from the tips of her fingers, tugging at the edges of her mouth.

He looked beautiful at the podium, arms outstretched as if he could capture them all in the width of his embrace. Clean, in his crisp white shirt and sharp red tie. She'd run her fingers over them that morning, stroked the starch of the collar and pressed the fabric flat against her palm. His hair was flecked with grey, but he still had the grin that she loved, the sheepish mouth and the folded lower lip. The little boy's smile, burgeoning with a childish excitement. His gesticulations were elegant, the craftsmanship of a seasoned politician, slow, tranquil motions that matched the earthy tone of his voice. There was that particular adroitness with which he reeled the audience in, engaged with them, wrapped them up in the intonations of his language, courted them with his visions.

Hillary's breath hitched in her throat as he began to end the speech. With careful, purposeful enunciation, Bill uttered the closing statement, "I still believe in a place called Hope." _I still believe in a place called Hope_ , her lips silently mimicking his. It had been her line. They had wrestled with the closer for days, until it had come to her straightaway, a double entendre so clever that all the staffers commended her. To Hillary, it had been far more personal than a catchy political quip. The place called Hope was the first date in the garden of the Yale art gallery, nestled in the lap of the statue, cradling his head against her shoulder. The moment wherein she had first realized that this man, with his broken past and fragmented means, would triumphantly rise to the aspirations of his highest hopes.

She and Chelsea made their way to the stage, feeling the energy of the crowd pour over them, cascading down their shoulders and bodies to the tips of their toes. Bill was smiling as he caught her in his arms first, resolutely clutching her waist as he placed his kiss upon her cheek. Hillary reached out to caress his jawline, clutching it still as Chelsea kissed him. He linked arms with them both, and they turned to the face the crowd, uproarious, dancing in the current of confetti, shouting above the music that blared through speakers, reveling in the push and swell of affection.

"We're going to make it, I think!" Bill leaned in to her side, voice just audible above the din.

"I always knew you would."

 

  

La Crosse, Wisconsin - August, 1992

Al Gore rubbed his eyes furiously, a half hearted attempt to fight off sleep. He felt his mouth twitch, and quickly moved his hand to stifle the yawn.

They had spent the entire day on the road, beginning in Cedar Rapids, crisscrossing north to Madison, then driving West to La Crosse, making what seemed like hundreds of stops in between, visiting mom and pop delicatessens, entertaining roadside crowds, mingling with potential voters at intimate town halls. It was well past midnight now as they checked into the hotel in La Crosse, and still they had to run over the next day's schedule before turning in.

"I hope you won't be up too late," Tipper emerged from the bathroom, in her nightgown and slippers, hair combed over her shoulders. She detested late nights.

Al stood up, padded over to her, and bussed her cheek. "I won't be very long," another yawn, slicing his sentence in half. He drew his palm upward, let it out this time. "Probably a few minutes. You go to bed, now." He patted her shoulder.

Tipper nodded, smiled. She began to peel the comforter off the bed. "Okay, I hope so. It's been a long day. You need some rest."

Al stepped into the narrow, dim hallway. They'd checked into hotels nearly every night since the bus tour began, and they all seemed so much the same to Al: the sad lighting, faded wallpaper, scratchy sheets. He took large steps as he walked the length to the Clintons' room, arriving at the door with his arm outstretched, poised to knock. Suddenly he paused, fist hovering, and listened. He heard talking, which meant that Hillary was still awake. _Typical._

"Door's open!" Bill called out.

He opened it. Bill was sitting in an armchair, ankles crossed comfortably. Hillary was curled up in his lap, one arm around him. She was still wearing her suit, but she'd unbuttoned one of the shiny brass buttons at the neck, and had no shoes on. Her legs were draped over his knees, stockinged feet, nude nylon. Bill's hand rested on her hip, the other holding a sheet of paper that was likely the schedule.

Al made an awkward gesture with his thumbs. "Came to go over the schedule," he said, putting on a strained smile, stating the obvious.

"Hey, Al," Hillary said, disentangling herself from her husband. Creases dimpled the front of her skirt as she rose. Bill's hand lingered on her hip a moment longer, and Al saw him swat her behind.

"Come sit by me," Bill laughed, motioning to the chair next to his. Al complied, producing his own wrinkled copy of the schedule from his pocket. Another yawn. He sprung to conceal it. 

Bill saw. "We'll get through this fast," he reassured him, popping the cap off of a ballpoint pen. He'd shirked his tie, and his work shirt was crumpled, sleeves rolled up. "I know we're all _fucking_ exhausted."

"You can say that again."

They worked their way through the array of locations and times, marking up the text. As they spoke, Al could spot Hillary out of the corner of his eye, digging through an open faced suitcase on the floor, uninterested with their conversation because she was already fully debriefed. When they'd first met, Al thought she bore a passing resemblance to Tipper; golden hair, blue eyes, big smiles. But Hillary was slimmer, smaller, had sharp elbows and a tiny waist. In the yellow light of the hotel room, her movements were languid and her hair was rumpled. It was unlike her; she was usually had steel in her spine, drew straight lines with her walk. Al figured this was the most at ease he'd ever seen her.

"Want something to eat, Al?" Hillary was rifling through a brown bag now.

"I'm good, thanks." He looked down at the paper again, eyes struggling to refocus, the words an inky blur.

Hillary returned to their side of the room, feet dragging against the thick carpet, eating an apple. She perched on the arm of Bill's chair, her toes dangling above the ground like a little girl. The apple was in her right hand, and Al watched as Bill took a bite out of it. Juice dribbled down his chin, and she wiped it with the back of her hand. An intimate gesture, and witnessing it made him feel an intruder. But he often felt that way around Bill and Hillary.

Before he'd joined the ticket, he'd read and heard a lot about their marriage. Hillary was a point of contention in America, and people had plenty to say about the "buy one, get one free" deal that Bill had touted early in the campaign. He'd also digested his fair share of gossip concerning the womanizing, and many naysayers had lambasted their marriage as a sham, an arrangement intended to benefit their respective political careers. He'd walked into the campaign uncertain of what he would find, and he now realized that their union was infinitely more complex than any rag sheet tabloid could adequately convey.

Bill had a wandering eye. Al had seen it; seen him flirt with girls at the rope line, comply to requests for hugs and kisses, proffer an offhanded wink when he suspected Hillary wasn't looking. Yet still, he had seen Bill pull his wife into his lap, kiss the back of her neck, toy with the hemline of her skirt, mumble _that's my girl_ into the shell of her ear. He was consumed by adoration for her. "Isn't she sharp," he'd tell Al, eyes glimmering, watching Hillary make speeches or pitch ideas at the round table. He told anecdotes about the Arkansas years, about the places they'd gone together while at Yale; one half-drunken night after a rally, he'd reminisced about the evening she'd sauntered up to him in the law library and introduced herself. "All long blonde hair, Al, and soft skin, so soft," Bill had said quietly. "Long blonde hair, just flat to the touch." They fought a lot; Al had seen that, too, had seen the flare of Hillary's nose, the thrust of her pointer finger in his face, had heard Bill shout, the deafening slam of doors. But Bill ached for approval from Hillary, more so than from Al or anyone else on the campaign. He deferred to her before making most decisions, big or small, and Al almost resented the sway she held over him. "She's the _Supreme Court_ ," some staffers scoffed. The viability of Al's partnership with Bill would determine the course of the next four years, yet no matter what camaraderie he'd been able to drum up, Hillary always had the upper hand. They completed each other's sentences, communicated with a single stare, operated in tandem. Sometimes, Al was unsure that he would ever be able to compete.

"Let's call it a night, Al," Bill was saying, looking up at Hillary. He laced his fingers through hers. "Tomorrow's gonna be a long day."

 

 

Washington, DC - January, 1993

As the band struck up the night's umpteenth rendition of "It Had to be You," Bill's hand stroked the length of her spine, feeling the crush of smooth gemstones between his wrist and fingers, gliding down until he came to the small of her back. 

"I love you, don't you know." They began to sway slightly to the music. Flashbulbs popped as the audience bestowed them with the occasional whistle or cheer. Each seemed more enthusiastic than the prior, each giddy with excitement to catch a glimpse of the new president and his first lady.

"I have an idea," Hillary whispered back, then a giggle. He sensed her breath on his jawline, warm and effervescent. 

Hillary's hair was twisted into braids, a thick, blonde coronet adorning the top of her head, every strand swept carefully upward. Her nape was bare, and in the car he'd curved his palm against the cool, exposed flesh until she had let out as sigh. She had been wide eyed all evening, gaping to take in the madding crowds in their finery and the convention halls decked with opulence, her irises so blue, the color of sunflowers. Black eyelashes, long and heavy, kissing the upper cheekbone when she laughed. Her mouth was red and her lips were plump, and her cheeks were pink with rouge, flushed by the cold winter's air. 

Her gown was amethyst, like fire tempered by ice. She was bejeweled from head to toe, the fabric festooned with luminous purple-blue beading that glistened under the bright lights, twinkled at the turn of her skirt. Swathes of silk tulle cascaded from her hips, fanning out as she spun, and the bodice and sleeves of the dress rose to meet slender wrists, the ivory base of her neck. Her waist so small, cinched with a belt, that Bill thought he could span it with his two hands. When he pressed into her close, he inhaled the scent of her, the dewy fragrance of lilac spliced with notes of sandalwood and musk, clinging to the hollow of her throat, the crevice beneath her ear, the plait of her hair.

"You are the president," Hillary said suddenly, as they swung around to face the other side of the gallery. She spared her intonations carefully, left discrete pauses between her words. A surreality.

"And you are _beautiful_ ," Bill countered, matching her sincerity.

She laughed a little, mouth falling open in the way that he liked, rolling her eyes. "I am serious!" she shot back, staring straight into him. "Look where we are." Dripping with awe. 

"You always said we'd get here." He twirled her out, and the house oohed and aahed appropriately. The rustle of the gown against his knees, the flitter of tissue as he reeled her back into his arms. "I was never so sure, but you were."

"That _is_ true," Hillary conceded. She looked over his shoulder, out at the sea of cameras and constituents. "But it's a whole other thing actually being here."

When the music drew to a close, Bill hooked his arm about the tiny circle of her midriff, and they moved to face the applauding crowd. Looking out into the blackness, squinting to discern the faces while they waved. He turned toward Hillary, to study her a moment. The regal tilt of her chin, the graceful line of her shoulders, the straight edge of her proud nose, the florid complexion, the flaxen hair wound like a rope. She was a dream, all starry constellations and fairy dust, dancing through the night they had fantasized about for decades. The night they had toiled for.

She met his gaze, lips parting slightly. "Just five more to go."

Bill bobbed his head, then broke into a smile. Five more balls, and then they'd go home, to the White House - of all places - where she would unravel. Jettison slippers and gown, step from the folds of purple and silk and gems, emerge naked except for the earrings in her lobes, the perfume wafting about her collarbone. Skin warm and pale, pulled taut at the ribcage, soft center of navel, eyes blinking. Unravelled, just for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I apologize for taking extra long to update, and for this chapter being SO lengthy! I don't think a chapter will get any more long winded after this, though, so don't worry ;) I tried to capture a few different facets of the campaign/victory here, and from a few perspectives. The Al vignette, though intended to reflect his sentiments, was actually somewhat inspired by George Stephanopoulos's observations of their marriage in his memoirs, and his recollection of once witnessing a similar scene of Hillary in Bill's lap at the end of the day. I hope you all like it, and I know tomorrow will be incredibly rough for all of us, so sincere wishes that you can get through the day as best as you can <3


	7. Storms

> _"But in those years and the lifetimes past,_
> 
> _I did not deal with the road,_
> 
> _And I did not deal with you, I know,_
> 
> _Though the love has always been..._
> 
> _  
>  _ _..._ _She said, 'every night he will break your heart',_
> 
> _I should've known from the first,_
> 
> _I'd be the broken hearted,_
> 
> _But I loved you from the start..."_

_  
_ Washington, DC - Summer, 1993

Hillary cradled her chin in her palm, elbows jabbing into her thighs.  Her skirt was crumpled and her eyes were bloodshot. She had erupted into tears when they called her with the news the night prior; she had sobbed on Air Force One home from Little Rock, and wept into Bill's shirt when he folded her up in his arms upon arrival in Washington. Now she was numb. She pressed her fingers against her cheek, felt how cold her skin was, like marble. And remembered.

Hillary had first met Vince the autumn Bill was elected attorney general, before the move to Little Rock, her last semester teaching law at the University of Arkansas. She had been fervently at work establishing a legal aid clinic there, and Vince was a member of the state bar association's committee on legal assistance. At the immediate sight of him, she liked him. He was soft-spoken and sensitive, courtly in manner, and thin as a rail in his heavy suit, hair salt-and-pepper, big, kind eyes. He listened when she talked, valued her conversations, admired her accomplishments. When they moved to Little Rock, he was the one who had campaigned for her hire at Rose Law, raving to the others about her raw intelligence, esteeming her sharp litigation skills, defending her when they guffawed at the notion of employing a female lawyer and later, when they'd griped about her appearance and name. 

She thought of the daily lunches they'd shared at The Villa, she and Webb and Vince at a crowded corner table in an out of the way Italian restaurant, well past the customary noon hour, swapping jokes, shoulders touching, emptying a bottle of wine, bestowing one another with ludicrous nicknames. _Hillary Sue._ Her bottom lip trembled, remembering. The business trips they'd made for depositions, the time he'd bought her a hat in a New York City milliner's shop, one to wear for the Kentucky Derby that year, trimmed with ribbon and berries and a sprig of flowers. The lingerie shows they'd dragged her to in Little Rock, the memory of him poking her in the ribs when she deemed them neanderthals through fits of laughter. One night in a hotel room, just her and Vince, Hillary on the bed propped up by her elbows, Vince in an armchair, legs crossed at the knees. A confessional of sorts; she remembered how she had talked about Bill, first prattling on about him adoringly, divulging her belief that he would one day be president, and then something had spilled out about the girls. Seeped through, in that rare, middle of the night honesty, a flash of vulnerability especially odd for her, but somehow liberating when it fell from her mouth. He had listened with a gentle expression, brown eyes peering at her with concern, and had reached across the space between them to take her hand in his when a tear, unsolicited, had slipped down the side of her face. His fingers had settled on the inside of her wrist.

Hillary stared down at the floor, her hands in her hair, making a tangle. She should have known Vince was too good for Washington. Astute, brilliant and thoughtful, so principled in his approach to law that Hillary had thought him akin to Atticus Finch. But he had had no pointed edges, no appetite for aggression. In the final days, they had had less and less time to talk, stripped of the leisure to entertain the long winded conversations they'd enjoyed in Arkansas.  Before leaving to visit Dorothy in Little Rock, she'd had to cancel a dinner with Vince at the last minute when a crisis emerged over the publication of a story airing dirt on Bill's family. "I have to talk to Bill and Virginia," she had told Vince over the phone, exhaustion lacing her words. She was often exhausted; her own father had died only months prior, and she had spent weeks traveling the country extensively to garner support for the healthcare reform bill. "Oh, I'm so sorry," Vince had said, considerate to the very end. "So am I," she had admitted, a confession disclosed after seemingly a long time. "You know, I'm just so sick of all this."

They had found him on a park bench. Slumped over, a briefcase by his side. It appeared that he had shot himself in the mouth, they said.

A sob rose in Hillary's throat, and she slowly slunk to the floor, wrapping her arms about her knees and burying her head in her lap. She rubbed her face in the thick, scratchy fabric of her skirt and narrowed her eyes into slits. Minutes passed before suddenly arms were around her, fingers curling protectively at her shoulder blades.

Hillary sat up slightly and moved into Bill's embrace, pulling around his middle. She rested her head against his shoulder as he raked through her hair, working out the snarls she'd knitted. "I'm sorry," she said after a moment, swiping at her tear stained cheeks with a fist. "You know I don't usually go to pieces like this."

"Don't be sorry," he nuzzled the topic of her head, voice muffled by her hair. "Don't ever be sorry."

She sniffled. "I feel responsible."

"We didn't know. All of us, we didn't know. Lisa didn't know. It's not your fault." Hillary sensed Bill grappling for the words, felt the shudder of his heart through the cloth of his shirt. He had known Vince since they were boys growing up in Hot Springs. She brought his hand to her mouth and pressed her lips against his wrist.

"I spoke to Tipper," she said softly, still clinging to his forearm. "About -- the warning signs of depression. I'm just thinking, if someone had only paid more attention. If _I_ had paid attention. There was -- there was never enough time to talk in those last weeks..." She trailed off, thinking of how she had been swamped with the healthcare task force, ceremonial events, public relations crises, most predominantly the Whitewater bungle; how she had been short with Vince, once even snapping at him, immediately sorry when she had detected the crestfallen look in his eyes.

"It's this city." Bill let out a sigh and tightened his grasp on her. "It's just this fucking city, this place. What a strange place. Washington. It gets to everyone, after a while."

 

In late September, as the leaves tinged with red and the stifling humidity of a Washington summer began to dwindle, the majority leader declared the final compromise healthcare bill dead on the Senate floor.

Aides and staffers hissed about the "healthcare disaster", voices haughty and high, while television pundits clucked at the colossal failure deemed "Hillarycare." Her popularity numbers plummeted. "The First Lady of the United States ought to have no say in policy making," one talking head proclaimed. Hillary thought of the months she'd spent painstakingly combing over each and every word of the nearly thousand page bill, of the elbows she'd rubbed and the flesh she'd pressed seeking support in congressional circles. Of testifying on the Hill, of addressing crowds in all corners of the country, a bulletproof vest strapped to her chest. She thought of the weight of the garment, pressing against her breast, the heaviness levied directly upon her ribs, crushing her heart.

 

 

Washington, DC - January, 1994

She had been sick with cancer for nearly a year. When the phone rang in the middle of the night, jolting Bill out of his sleep, he already knew.

"I'm so sorry, Bill. She passed away in her sleep."

He received the news in the dark, the receiver like a rock in his hand, Hillary's concerned fingers grazing his pajama sleeve as she roused from sleep. He knew, and still, it jolted him.

"Oh God, oh God," Bill murmured, speech running together. Not crying, but trembling, his shoulders, hands, legs trembling. He ran his palms over the comforter frantically, grasping at the threads, feeling frantic.

"Bill, baby, oh my God, I'm so sorry," Hillary, fishing through the blackness for him, swathing him in her embrace. The rustle of her hair against his cheek, the firmness of her hands thrust into his back and stomach, to soothe the spasm of his body. "I'm so sorry, honey. I'm sorry."

At her touch, he burst into tears. She cradled him, his head against her breast as he wept. Bad memories at first. The earliest, farthest memories tucked into the folds of his brain; Hot Springs, the summer when he was five, when Daddy, having drained a bottle of whiskey, had shoved her against the kitchen stove and she'd singed the back of her hand. How he'd wailed at the sight of the red hot scar. When he was seven, swabbing her cheek with iodine, pressing the washcloth against the contours of her face, and she had made a smile for him as he scrubbed, still in her hospital uniform, the perfectly ironed skirt, pristine white. At nine, arms crossed and feet planted resolutely before her as she nursed bloodied hands over the kitchen sink, shouting out at his stepfather, a drunken, slumped over pile on the floor, "Stand up, Daddy, you are _drunk!_  You won't hit my mother again!" Horrible recollections, what he had kept, what he had spared, what he had professed only to Hillary.

"Don't think about that," Hillary whispered suddenly. Knowing, knowing, always knowing. She cupped his jaw. "She was so happy in the second half of her life. So incredibly proud of you."

And he thought of that, too; her red leather boots, hair parted by the skunk stripe, eyebrows drawn on with pencil and drippy false eyelashes. Sprawled out on the plush carpet of the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock, tickling Chelsea's round stomach until she cooed, tapping toes and fingers and the tip of her nose. She adored Chelsea. It had taken some time, but she had come around to Hillary, too, admitting to Bill that she was _a growth experience._ In the end, she had loved her, her rock iron strength and her valiant defensiveness of her family, and Bill had finally recognized that the two women who had shaped his life, once seemingly so apart and irreconcilably different, were more alike than he had ever fathomed.

Bill let out a sigh and swabbed his face with his sleeve. "It was expected."

"It doesn't make it any easier," Hillary lifted her own palm and dragged it down the sides of his face, as she had done for years.

He straightened, trying to reorganize his thoughts, get his emotions in order. He reached for the lamp, illuminating the room. In the soft light, he detected a smattering of tears on Hillary's cheeks. "I love you," she said, squeezing his hand.

"I love you, too." Bill took her into the crook of his arm, leaning against the soft down of the pillow. He clasped his forehead and felt the wrinkles that time and stress had etched. "We'll have to wake up Chelsea and tell her."

"Two grandparents within a year, God."

"What a fucking year." He exhaled. "I'll go to Hot Springs right away."

She nodded. "I'll go with you, if you want. Or I can stay and make travel arrangements for the family. Whatever you want."

"No, no you and Chelsea come down tomorrow," Bill said, wheels and cogs spinning as he mapped out the logistics. "That'll be best."

"Are you sure?"

"I'll be fine, sweetheart, don't worry."

Suddenly, he remembered and let out a groan. "I told them I'd make a decision on the special prosecutor."

"Bullshit," Hillary rolled her eyes. "Such fucking bullshit. Anyways, don't you think about that right now. We'll worry about that afterward." _We'll worry._ She slipped her hand inside his sleeve and clutched his wrist.

They fell quiet for a few minutes, staring up at the ceiling, letting silence shroud them. And so Bill thought of Virginia again; the night of the Inaugural Balls, in white and black polka dot, diamonds at her neck and a proud smile masking the better width of her face. The skunk stripe teased into a glamorous coiffure, held stiff by a cloud of hairspray, and the starstruck giddiness with which she regarded Barbra Streisand, who wholeheartedly befriended her. Finally happy. Finally whole.

 

One week later, against Hillary's better judgement, Bill caved on the appointment of a special prosecutor to examine the Whitewater case.

 

 

Beijing, China - September, 1995

Hillary set her palms to the sheets of paper in front of her, ran her hands over the carefully typed text and sentences she'd underlined with red pencil. They had spent days working on the UN speech, carefully piecing together every syllable and scrutinizing each element of semantics, weary shoulders huddled over the dimly lit workspace on the plane even through the nearly fourteen hour flight to Beijing. 

"What do you want to accomplish?" Madeleine had asked.

"I want to push the envelope as far as I can on behalf of women and girls."

It seemed, to Hillary, that she had spent so much of her life toeing the line. Staring down at the pages, Hillary thought of all the times she'd had to to reinvent herself, to transform and conform, to don a seemingly endless parade of disguises. When Hillary Rodham had become Hillary Clinton, in Arkansas, after they'd mocked the permanent in her hair, and the Chicago in her voice, and the ambition in her step. In the '92 campaign, when she'd competed in bake-offs and chopped off her hair, a proffered apology for Tammy Wynette and tea. In '93, when healthcare reform imploded, the remnants of which were laid at her feet, the sword wedged into her side for straying from her place.

So many skins.

After the healthcare debacle, she'd rounded up the Hillaryland team in her West Wing office and had nearly pled surrender; she'd shut up and stick to china patterns for state dinners, if only because any conscious action on her part ended up doing more harm than good. They'd managed to convince her otherwise, largely by inducing introspective conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt, and together, they'd crafted a new role for the First Lady, subtle ways of effectively exploiting her role to advance the policies and issues she championed. "Symbolism can be efficacious," Hillary was told, and so she became a symbol. She travelled with Chelsea to South Asia, seeking to highlight the importance of daughters in countries whose cultures inherently devalued girls; she'd met with the Benazir Bhutto, the woman prime minister of Pakistan, swathed head to foot in yellow chiffon, and with Indian schoolgirls in uniform red and yellow, legs folded and bare feet crossed, and with a strange coalescing of Muslim and Hindu women in a small Bangladeshi village, where they'd crowded around her, eyes wide, asking questions, divulging bits of their lives. The poem read aloud to her by an Indian student, reflecting on the language she said was spoken by her grandmother, and her mother, and so many generations before - silence. The word had reverberated through Hillary, through her heart and soul, and so she made a declaration of her own then.  _Silence is not spoken here._

Hillary would gaze down at her own skin now; the flesh at her wrist bone, the forearm, the top of her hand, the hint of thigh peeking out from beneath her skirt. And she would pinch it, fingernails nipping in, just to ascertain that it still had the requite thickness Eleanor Roosevelt would expect her to have.

She had made her vows, and she would never consider receding into silence again. They could tear her up, but she would not retreat to the dark confines and hushed quarters of silence. She would speak. She would speak for those who could not, those that had been banished to upending generations and generations of silence. For her own mother, Dorothy, at the Formica edged dinner table in Park Ridge, the nights when Hugh abated her into silence over a plate she'd cooked. For the women and girls in China, suffering state sponsored human rights abuses at the hands of patriarchal perceptions and belligerent government. For Anasuya, the author of the stanza, who had delivered her poetry shy and lovely, curious brown eyes hesitantly peeking out over the top of the page, feet shuffled together and a children's braid swung over her shoulder. For Hillary Rodham.

Hillary traced the paper, finger falling just beneath the line she'd most heavily underlined, the place where the red lead had bored resolutely into the page.

"Human's rights are women's rights, 

and women's rights are human rights, 

once and for all."

 

 

Washington, DC - November, 1995

Monica Lewinsky twirled a long strand of black hair as they talked. She wrapped it around her finger, around the pointed, manicured nail, and relinquished it only when he made her laugh out loud, to flatten her hand across her open mouth.

Bill smiled at her, the thing that he did with his bottom lip folded, the smitten thing, the grin he'd flashed at countless girls, Hillary most of all. Bill had eyed this girl at the rope line before, at the leaving ceremonies when the interns were herded out onto the White House Lawn for waves and pleasantries before boarding Air Force One. She was curvy, the waistband of her pinstripe paints stretched over full hips, thick thighs; the crescent of skin at the neckline of her blouse barely pink, fleshy, seemingly soft.  She was twenty-two, from Beverly Hills, she told him, and she acted it, dissolving into fits of girlish giggles and flirtatious smiles. They had been speaking alone in the Chief of Staff's office for a few minutes, and he stood close enough to inhale the scent of her fruity perfume, her shampoo.

She said something, and he reached out to touch her arm lightly, fingers _rat tat tat_ against the fabric of her sleeve, brushing downward. Monica was looking at him through hooded eyes now, eyelashes fluttering, and again, she laughed. He watched as her mouth fell open and closed, open and closed.

"Monica? Monica?" Someone was calling out from the hallway, and at the sound she languidly turned her head in the direction of the door, neck lazing in response.

"I'm coming," she yelled back, and then her gaze returned to him, red tongue flitting out between her teeth, lips covered in pink gloss. "If you'll excuse me, Mr. President."

Monica turned on her heel and walked toward the door. Bill looked on, and she must have known it, because she drew her hands behind her, hooked her thumbs around the hemline of her jacket, and lifted, pulling the material taut, exposing the small of her back. Pillowy skin and lace, elastic lines of black lace extended just above the hip bone, pressed up against the flesh, straps of her thong.

 

He saw her a second time that evening, and he kissed her. He had been thinking of her pink mouth and the lace tugged over tender skin, and when he saw her strut by, he called her to him. "You know, I have a really big crush on you," she admitted, peeking at him through a lock of hair, either making coy or genuinely meaning it. So he laughed. Bill showed her his private study off the Oval, and in the adjacent windowless hallway, he asked her if he could kiss her. Her body up against the wall, and him descending on her, that pink mouth. She wrote her name and phone number on a scrap of paper afterwards, bubbly scrawl, an open circle dotting the _i_ in Monica, the _2's_ in 202 fat, curly.

The third time it was late, past ten o'clock, and he sought her out, in the chief of staff's office. Led her through George's office, into the winding hallway and the private study, all the lights turned off. "You don't have to call me Mr. President," he said through the darkness, and then they kissed again, her fingers fumbling to unbutton her jacket, then yanking her blouse over her shoulders, her head. His hands moved to her chest, flat palms roaming, and he lifted her bra up, thinking little other than her flesh was soft, warm, as he had expected.

Bill took a phone call when she sunk down on her knees before him, and in that moment, she was easy. Effortless. Uncomplicated, no thick knots of emotion, just pleasure, self indulgence. Nothing had been so simple in so long. Young and gratifying and on her knees, making his mind numb; he saw the top of her head as it moved, the black, matted hair. After he hung up the phone he came close, and clamped down on his lip, and pushed away.

Monica rocked back on her heels and stared up at him. "I'd like to complete that."

"I'd like that, too," he cracked. "But I have to wait -- until I can trust you." And then, seeing the look on her face, he thrust his hand out and stroked her hair.

He went back to their bedroom that night, after it had been done. Hillary was asleep, blanket raised high, and he made out the familiar, curved shape of her body beneath the comforter, her tousled blond hair against the pillow. He felt the guilt in the pit of his stomach; but it was a familiar guilt, one he'd conjured too many times before, the inevitable, miserable lowness that he'd worn through. He'd made a contorted effort to stop, and here he was again, fucking up, back to his broken ways, a broken man.

But old habits die hard. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I want to apologize for taking, quite literally, a million years to update - I'm back in college so I have less time, but I still have three chapters left and so I'll do my best to get them up weekly! I know there's a lot of...horrible stuff in this chapter lol but I really did realize how many deaths & failures they had to deal with within that first year. Of course, writing the Monica vignette was heart wrenchingly painful, and all too fucking easy to do thanks to the Starr Report, but I thought it was consistent with the shittiness plaguing the rest of the chapter, and kind of necessary to finally face the cheating head on from Bill's perspective (no pun intended). So that's why I decided to go "there" lol


	8. The Chain

 

> _"Running in the shadows,_
> 
> _Damn your love,_
> 
> _Damn your lies..._
> 
> _  
> _ _...And if you don't love me now,_
> 
> _You will never love me again,_
> 
> _I can still hear you saying,_
> 
> _You would never break the chain..."_

_  
_ Washington, DC - January, 1998

Bill placed his hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. "Hillary," he said, so soft. Almost a prayer.

"Mhm." She stirred slightly and twisted beneath the covers, eyes remaining closed.

"Hillary, honey," Bill repeated, louder this time, his grip on her shoulder firmer now. "Hilly, baby, please wake up. I have to tell you something."

Her watched her wake, eyes blinking open, red tongue running over lips dry from sleep, the drowsy pleasure of slumber still etched in her face as she sat up slowly. She rubbed her eyes with her fists before she looked up at him, squinting. Her blonde hair was tousled and her cheeks were pink from being pressed up against the pillow; there had always been about her a rumpled sleepiness when woken before dawn that he loved. For a moment, his thoughts flitted to better mornings, mornings when he'd kissed her awake, felt the naked curve of her body through thin sheets, snaked his hand up her pajama shirt and pressed his palm against the warm flesh he found there, her soft stomach and the crevice between her breasts.

Remembering, he hated himself again.

"What's wrong?" Hillary was asking, voice faintly groggy. It was dark in their bedroom, save for the slivers of blue, early morning light that had seeped through drawn curtains, and he saw her eyes widen as she struggled against sleep and the darkness. "Did something happen?"

"No, no," Bill said, tone perhaps too soothing for what he was about to reveal. He resisted the urge to tuck an especially cockeyed lock of hair behind her ear, to smooth it back into place; and instead stared down at his hands. "There's just -- there's something in today's papers you should know about."

He looked back up at her. She was sufficiently alert now and a curious expression had crossed her face. Her brows furrowed together. "What are you talking about?"

 _When you go to tell the lie, square your shoulders and raise your chin._ Some vague advice floated through his mind, a line procured from the massive bevy of thoughts he'd entertained through the night in preparation for this encounter. So he did. He faced her, lifted his chin, made a line out of his shoulders. Once the nature of his conversation became clear, Hillary flicked on the nightstand lamp, the sudden outpouring of light forcing both their eyes to readjust, blink. Yet he went on, undeterred by the harsh yellow glow, mustering his best attempt to appear composed as he divulged one detail after another. There had been reports of an affair with a former White House intern, but it wasn't true. It would be in the Post this morning, but it wasn't true. It was Kenneth Starr again; that bastard, he was expanding his investigation on the pretext that the girl had been instructed to lie to the Paula Jones lawyers, but it wasn't true. None of it was true.

All the while, Hillary stared at him, almost as if studying while he spoke, digesting his words and then parsing them apart in her own brain. She'd scooped her glasses off the nightstand when she'd switched on the light, and the way she was looking at him, intently through thick frames, reminded him of the studious manner with which she bent over books, papers, wrestling with what she read.

Finally, she spoke. "This girl -- _who_ is this girl?"

"Monica...Monica Lewinsky?" Bill said, as if searching for her last name. Incredibly calculated antics. He felt the burn in the pit of her stomach. "I met her during the government shutdown two years ago, you know, when she was volunteering. I talked to her a couple times, she asked for some job help, and, I mean -- I felt sorry for her, I guess, I just wanted to help a little -- but she misinterpreted the attention. She's a nice girl, but she's very insecure, kind of infatuated, you know the type. A little crazy. She misread what happened, repeated the story to some family or friends, imagined what didn't happen. And I tried to fix it myself, because I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, so I asked Vernon to help her find a job, see if he could get her out of town and off my back." He shrugged his shoulders, palms raised upward, feigning nonchalance. "But nothing ever happened. Nothing more than that."

Hillary raised her eyebrow, and his heart shuddered in his chest. She wasn't entirely convinced yet; he could tell. "Bill..."

"Nothing happened."

"Are you telling the truth?"

"Hillary," Bill swallowed the bile rising in his throat and caught her wrists in his hands. He looked her in the eyes. "I promise, nothing happened. We didn't have sex, and I never told her to lie. The attention could have been -- misconstrued, perhaps, but there was no affair." And again, the lie again, voice dropping low. " _There. was. no. affair._ "

Hillary nodded slowly now, and he could perceive the wheels spinning in her brain, the lie clicking into place, her posture relaxing slightly as she consumed it. The conviction in her nod rose, the nod she always did when their sentiments fused, whether it was policy or a stump speech or something like this. "Okay," she said, raking her hands through her hair. "Okay. We'll take care of it. We will."

He exhaled, finally allowing himself to smile at her. He squeezed her forearm.

"They're always out for blood," Hillary was saying, the lie having settled within her, momentum gained as it raced through her mind. He knew she was thinking of the entire Starr investigation, of the way Vince Foster's suicide had been weaponized against them and of the Whitewater scrutinization. She was placing his lie in the pantheon of those other events, and the guilt began to cut through him.

But he nodded. Nodded and nodded and nodded, detesting himself, keeping up the facade that he had constructed and now had to live down.

 

She had to believe him.

It wasn't easy; she was older now, and there was much more at stake. She had grown too comfortable, had let herself be lulled into a false sense of security, refuge taken in the gilded cage. They hadn't had one of those conversations in a long time, not since that January morning during the primary season, all those years ago, when she'd questioned him over and over about the Gennifer Flowers story. _Have I ever lied to you?_ She turned over memories in her mind, recalling the litany of confessions she'd endured throughout the seventies, the eighties, straight up to '92. The countless conversations about other girls, and the way she'd wept, the way _he'd_ wept, and how angry she'd get, staring at him with bloodshot eyes as he wallowed in his pitiful misery, then screaming at him until her throat was dry and her knees buckled. Sometimes she'd stay mad for days, on certain occasions even weeks, moving into the other bedroom and curling up with Chelsea on lonely nights. And other times, still, he'd touch her while she sobbed or screamed -- maybe his arm around her waist, or even his fingers brushing the top of her hand -- and she'd fall into their bed with her legs wound tightly around his torso, her teeth in his shoulder blade. _No more, no more, no more._ Sweet nothings.

Hillary saw the article in the Post that morning. "Clinton accused of urging aide to lie," the headline read. Her eyes darted over the text. The girl had given a sworn affidavit a few weeks prior denying the charges, but she was going to be deposed that Friday by the Jones lawyers, and there was some discussion of phone calls taped by a woman at the Pentagon that allegedly corroborated Starr's accusations. Hillary remembered Bill's explanation, that the girl had imagined things and had exaggerated the truth in order to boast to family and friends; it was just plausible enough that Hillary could make herself believe it. "This story seems ridiculous, and I frankly smell a rat," read a quote from their lawyer Bob Barnett, and she inhaled his words, drew them to her chest for comfort. She skimmed the rest of the page, landing at the bottom to where they'd printed a picture of the girl, a small, black and white rectangle, what had been the portrait on her West Wing pass. She was attractive.

But Hillary had to believe. There were doubts, of course, given the history, yet she could swallow them if she tried. She had to believe that it was different now. It wasn't Arkansas anymore, and Bill had changed. He was now the man she always knew he could be, the president that she had long dreamed he would become. She had to believe that the office of the presidency had done what she never could quite do, which was coerce him into fidelity. The gilded cage. She had to believe that he loved her enough. That he loved her enough to spare her the humiliation, to not deliver to the naysayers, on a silver platter, the stuff of their wet dreams, what would validate the drawn out, multi million dollar investigations, the long held derision over his presidency, the cold, frigid bitch caricature that they'd made her out to be. She had to believe that he knew that this had been the work of their life, that they'd toiled blood and sweat and tears together for this since Yale, and that he would not risk it all for the trivial lust of fucking an intern in the Oval. She had to believe that he would not lie to her.

And so Hillary soldiered on. She held her chin high on the _Today_ show a week later, when Matt Lauer asked her about the story. She exhaled deep and savaged the enemies, just as she had done all that time ago on _60 Minutes._ There was, too, another sound bite lifted from the _Today_ interview and cast to the masses, the moment when she denounced the story as a "right wing conspiracy theory," and they raked the coals over her for that one. She had been angry when she'd said it; she had thought of the atrocity with which they'd wielded Vince's death as a political bargaining chip, had thought of the morning Virginia died, when even in light of the news Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich had dredged up the Whitewater scandal on the early shows, and Bill had looked on, face still stained by tears. And, too, the "right wing conspiracy" was an effective void, a focused point, in which to funnel her own fears and her own rage. Later, when she returned to the White House, the family and close advisers who had holed up in the solarium to watch the interview greeted her with a round of rousing applause, and she'd titled her head confidently before announcing, "I guess that'll teach them to fuck with us."

But there were doubts still.

_Have I ever lied to you?_

 

 

Washington, DC - August, 1998 

In the space between sleeping and dreaming, Hillary heard the call of her name. "Hillary. Hillary. Honey, please wake up."

She felt his hand on her shoulder as she came to, felt how he cupped the muscle, heard her own name again, "Hillary, sweetheart, I have to tell you something." _Baby, sweetheart, honey._ Even in the grogginess of being roused from deep sleep, she could feel her stomach drop, the flash of sudden fear shuddering through her body. _Please, God, don't let it be this._

Hillary sat up. He wasn't seated on the edge of the bed this time; he was pacing, his fingers in his hair. She put her glasses on and twisted her hands together, trying to find solace at the juncture of her knuckles, the peaks of bone touching. "What's wrong? What happened?" But she was afraid to look.

Bill swiveled to face her, and his glance was wavering. "Hillary, I --"

Then he stopped short and turned on his heel again. Hillary knew he was stalling, and she wasn't sure what she wanted him to do. _Fuck_.Her ribcage contracted against the loud hammering of her heart, and it was heavy to breathe. She exhaled, let her chin drop against her chest, opened her mouth before looking up again, forcing eye contact. _You can handle this._ And so she said, "Please, Bill, just tell me."

His mouth quivered, his hands pulled tightly over each other. She saw the blinking of his eyes and the haste with which his chest rose and fell. The anguish in every corner of his face. Then she knew.

"The Monica thing was more serious than I let on."

 _There it is._ Everything gave out from beneath her. Hillary's breathing was jagged, her lungs struggling for short, quick breaths, her whole body gasping for air, gulping, open mouthed. "What do you mean? What are you saying?" she thought she might be screaming; she wasn't sure. "It's all true?"

Bill was staring at her, slack jawed, and the sight of him, silent, only made her more irate. "You fucking answer me!" she knew she was yelling now, every syllable in her words throbbing with the hot, scorching tears streaming down her face.

"It's true," he confessed, and hung his head.

Hillary slumped over her middle, folding in half as the the anger sawed through her like a knife, her shoulders convulsing as she let out sobs. She wanted her chance to fall apart, to be the broken one for once, to finally destroy any semblance of composure, to succumb to hysterics; she was so, so, so _fucking tired._ Her chest heaved, she couldn't breathe again, she was panting, the pressure closing in on her from all sides, the sour taste of gall rising in her throat, low, guttural noises escaping the back of he mouth.

Bill was saying something, and then his hands were on her, trying to steady her, but she snapped up and slapped him away. "Don't fucking touch me!" she shouted in his face, years and years of suppressed rage pouring out of her. Bubbling from the pores she'd plugged, the sadness she'd effaced. Now it was over. Now it was all out. "You goddamn bastard!"

Hillary got up from the bed and pushed away, wrapping her arms around herself, feebly attempting to still her own spasms. He watched her, and he was frightened; she could tell by the look on his face. He'd never seen her like this before, had never seen her go to pieces. All the other times, she'd cried and yelled, but never like this. This was different. She burned her eyes into him, hating him in that moment, hating the way he stared, the way his mouth was open, the way his hands had fallen limp at his side, the way tears were starting to well up in his own eyes. _Look. See what you've done to me._

"Hillary, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was just trying to protect you. I couldn't bring myself to admit it."

_Here it begins._ The mewing. "You _lied_ to me!" Her voice was reaching pitches she didn't know she was capable of. She extended her arm, lifted the pointer finger, accusatory and trembling, aimed directly at the center of his chest, to punctuate the _you._ Then she shouted it over and over again, splitting open his empty words, laying bare the covenant he'd breached, what he had broken.  _My husband has many faults, but he's never lied to me_. The ultimate betrayal. 

Bill continued to try to apologize, but she drowned him out, kept shouting -- "Liar! Bastard! Son of a bitch!" -- experienced the insatiable urge to do something, anything with her hands -- she knocked the stack of books off the nightstand, flung one at his face; when he dodged it landed on the bed with a thump. "I cannot stand another goddamn fucking day with you!" Her arm swung out at a lamp, an unintentional sacrifice of her body shudder, but she watched with satisfaction as it smashed against the wall and shattered at his feet. "Divorce, _I_ want a divorce!" she yelled, savoring her opportunity, finally, to say those words that he'd taunted her with in Arkansas. Then she forced her flat, furious hand into the side of his chest and shoved when he dared come near her. Over and over again, "Why did you lie to me?" What he couldn't and wouldn't answer.

Eventually, she collapsed on the floor, gathered her knees to her chest and took her face in her hands, the capacity for anything save soft cries spent. He was silent. Hillary looked up, her eyes red, incapable of sobbing, too exhausted to keep up her physical barrage. "Why was I never enough." It wasn't even a question.

"Hillary," he said. His face wet. "You _are_ enough. You're more than enough. You're more than enough."

"I've never, ever, been enough for you," she murmured, hysteria replaced by cool, quiet rage, the rigor settling in her bones, the paralysis of the heart. "Oh, God, I should've known. It will never, ever, change. The amount of times you've broken my heart. Jesus Christ." Then she shook her head, scoffed a little as she marveled at her own naïveté.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," Bill was choking to get his words out through his own sobs. "I'm so, so, so sorry."

But her heart had hardened into a cold, hard stone, and she had no sympathy when she cast slanted eyes over him; just disgust and despair, a glimpse of a broken line with no clear direction left. "Chelsea must be told now," Hillary said, tone even, almost practical.

He nodded, bent over, not speaking anymore.

"You will tell her." Frigid as ice. Untouchable. "You will tell her how you lied. To all of us. Each one of us. How you lied."

  

At eight o'clock, with two hours before Bill was scheduled to address the nation with a video statement, lawyers and speechwriters were still clustered in the solarium, scrutinizing each word of the confessional statement down to the wire. Hillary had been holed up in the residence since he had returned from his testimony to the Starr jury; she had glanced at him when he came to the living quarters for a shower and a bite to eat, but she hadn't spoken a word. He'd looked tired and angry.

She paced the second floor, hair tied up in a ponytail, no makeup on. She felt more like Hillary Rodham than she had in years. She remembered when the Gennifer Flowers story had broke on the '92 campaign trail; she'd pulled on her best suit, shiny brass buttons, combed her hair silky and curling over her shoulders, mouth red with lipstick. Hillary Clinton, yanked dutifully over Hillary Rodham. The staffers and aides had been surprised when they'd seen her, beautiful and bubbly, weaving through campaign headquarters. That evening in August, two full days and nights after the confession, she caught a glimpse of herself in the reflective surfaces of the residence, and saw eyes puffy from crying bouts, soft wrinkles lining the corners of her face.

Hillary had been thinking about Monica. She was just twenty-two when it had begun. Hillary hadn't even known Bill when she was twenty-two, but she could remember the way she'd looked then, the year she'd graduated from Wellesley and had her picture printed in _Life_ magazine. Long dark hair that she wore in a thick wave down her back, and clear skin and the glasses with the octagonal frames. She'd seen enough pictures of Monica to know how vastly different she looked, the enormous gap between them; Monica wasn't beautiful enough to bowl one over, but she was the kind of pretty her husband liked, the drippy eyelash and matted hair type. They always looked like that, all the others. Hillary conjured memories of the times Bill had called _her_ beautiful, when he'd whispered into her ear during a dance, or let out an appreciative exclamation when she descended from the stairs for a state dinner, or moaned into the side of her face when he was tangled up in her hair, her legs, her limbs. But she was so unlike them.

She continued to prowl the residence, stewing over the decades of confessions and girls until she stirred herself into nausea, and then selected to go up the solarium. It was an impromptu decision; but before she could reconsider, her legs started out in direction for the stairs, propelled by curiosity, perhaps by love, perhaps by the need to escape the solace of her own thoughts.

There were at least a dozen people in the room, and they all stopped and stared when she appeared in the doorframe. They looked frazzled, each and every one of them, pens tucked behind ears and sleeves rolled up. The television set was on, running through the endless news cycle coverage of the scandal, and one perceptive staffer hurriedly flicked it off at the sight of Hillary. Bill looked up at her too; he almost seemed worse than when she'd spotted him earlier that day, large bags beneath his eyes and his head in his hands. It felt strange standing at the outskirts of the chaos for once, but Hillary was not prepared to play the savior for the umpteenth time. "I won't physically stand there when you tell them," she'd told him the prior morning in passing, when she realized the nationwide confession would be forthcoming, the memory of "stand by your man" ever present in her keen mind as she made the comment.

Chelsea stepped toward her, and she wrapped her arm around her daughter's shoulder for comfort as they stood there. Gradually, the room returned to their work, the din raising again, lawyers waving papers and speechwriters pitching suggestions. Hillary was still, feigning the quiet interest of an observer. She spotted the momentary instances when Bill, in the sea of handlers, would glance over at her out of the corner of his eye, probably when he suspected she was not looking. _He needs me,_ Hillary mused. She knew what he wanted; for her to fall to his side, pore over the statement and levy her criticisms, reframe the words until they satisfied her approval, and, consequently, his. But she was still cold, and well restrained.

Eventually, however, she allowed a sliver of advice, a small offering that might have sounded scornful to to the others, yet captured what the both of them knew to be true. "Well, Bill, this is your speech," she said, noting the hush that fell over the room when she opened her mouth. "You're the one who got yourself into this mess, and only you can decide what to say about it."

Then she linked her arm through Chelsea's and left.

 

 

Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts - August, 1998

Bill knew how much his wife resented being leftto an island with him. She hadn't so much as looked at him since they'd arrived; she'd curled up in her own corners of the house with a book, dined alone on the terrace, and barely interacted with anyone other than Chelsea, who often escaped their miserable excuse for a vacation to join friends from Stanford. They slept in separate bedrooms; back in the White House, he'd already been exiled to the couch. The night before they'd left DC, she'd appeared before the sofa suddenly, body concealed purposefully by a heavy robe.

"You need to tell me what happened," she'd said, calmly and coolly, like a lawyer seeking an account from her client. She barely made eye contact.

He understood what she meant; yet the request still sent him into a sweat. She had never made such a demand upon him before, had always seemed content with the half-truths of his admissions. But everything about this time was different, and so he had hurriedly prepared the abbreviated version of events while she stood, waiting, with her arms crossed. He spared the details, skirted around the nitty-gritty. Fooling around. Blowjobs. Some gifts. Her face was blank. Then Bill had stumbled over his words, racing to explain how it hadn't meant anything, but before he could dissolve into his stream of apologies, she turned on her heel and exited.

In Martha's Vineyard, he lay awake at night, stomach twisting into knots, and feared that she would leave him. This was, perhaps, the crushing blow. She'd never threatened divorce before, not until the fit of white hot rage she'd expelled the morning of the confession. The recollections of that morning tore Bill apart; his heart shattered remembering the rasping wail of her cries, the misery etched into her tear stained face, what she'd yelled. He had wanted, even in that moment of ultimate condemnation, nothing more than to pull her into his arms, soothe her, kiss her hair, attempt to stitch up the wounds he'd inflicted.

He deserved to lose her. Yet still, he could not picture what it would be like to live without her; what it would be like to seek her out in the usual places, and not find her there; how he could possibly fill the gaps that would be incurred by her absence. In the long, sweaty nights of mid-August, just before his fifty-second birthday, he remembered what it was like being twenty four years old, and needing Hillary Rodham like breathing. All over again, he felt the ache.

Bill missed the banal luxury of speaking to her. The conversations they'd conducted for years; anything and everything; policy, history, love, their life together. The steeliness in her eyes when he riled her up to debate a topic, her pointer fingers at the ready and her tongue poised to lash out in the kind of argument they enjoyed. The mischievous flit of tongue when she perched in his lap and he whispered in her ear. The soft smile when she curled up on his side in their bed, reminiscing about Chelsea's first walk and words. The furrow of her brow when he parsed out a major policy proposal with her, and she'd mark up the text with a fat, ballpoint pen, exercising the fine judgement of her sharp mind.  He remembered Yale; the first apartment they shared, her with her head tucked beneath the soft, yellow glow of a desk lamp, cheek propped up by her fist, reading aloud from an open book. And he remembered Hillary rocking Chelsea against her hip at the kitchen table in Arkansas, while Bill flattened out the newspaper before them so all three could look down at the gray pages, Chelsea running small fingers and sticky hands over the black headlines. In Washington, the first year of the healthcare task force, Hillary's smarting spine bent over endless research and policy papers and legislation drafts, calling out to him from the overstuffed chair in the solarium late into the night. "Look at this!" she would exclaim, glasses in one hand. 

He missed the throaty shriek of her laughter, the way she tilted her head back when she was really amused to reveal the full white, column of her neck, its rise and fall; her red, open mouth and the gentle crescent of her overbite; how, when he placed his hand on the sternum, he could feel its throb. He missed lacing his fingers at the back of her neck, the brush of her hair against his knuckles and the soft peaks of bone beneath the nape. He missed calling her _Hee-a-ree,_ yanking his arm about her and kissing the top of her smart head. He missed her touch; _her_ arms reaching out for him, warm and affectionate, impatiently pulling at his tie to loosen it, undoing the buttons, dragging her hands over his chest, pressing kisses into his collarbone, her warmth breath against the shell of his ear to whisper "I love you."

He wondered if he would ever feel it again.

 

Hillary slipped in next to Chelsea. Her daughter put her hand flat and comforting against her forehead before bringing the comforter around their shoulders and turning off the lamp. She fell asleep soon after that, arm still reaching out for her mother, and Hillary stared at her daughter in the dark, listening to the soft hum of her slumber.

Hillary remembered in Arkansas, how even in the angriest flashes of rage, when she feared she would combust at the mere thought of one more woman, Chelsea had always been the first reason to stay. She was eighteen years old now, on the verge of her sophomore year in Stanford, and technically an adult, but when Hillary looked at her, she still saw the bright eyed little girl with blonde ringlets and a big smile. Bill had, indisputably, always been an incredible father to her. And so Hillary had long tried to shelter her from her father's indiscretions, to protect the sanctified image she had of him, and the one that he - in his daughter's eyes - deserved. She was sorry she hadn't been able to this time.

As she fell asleep, she thought of the divorce she'd threatened, what it would mean, the reasons to remain. _Well if you didn't care a lot, you wouldn't stay._ And for the first time in days, she began to favor staying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, Happy Valentine's Day ;) I struggled to get this chapter just right, because I feel like there was...so much going on in terms of emotions for the both of them, and I doubt I'll ever be quite satisfied. Sorry again for taking forever to update!


	9. Beautiful Child

 

 

 

> _"You touch, I have no choice,_
> 
> _I have to stay..."_
> 
>  
> 
> _"...but I'm not a child anymore_
> 
> _I'm tall enough_
> 
> _To reach for the stars..."_

_  
_ Washington, DC - September, 1998

That September harbored August's demons, the heavy humidity of summer kindled in a city built upon a swamp, sweat sticking to clammy legs and hands and insides of wrists as the weeks droned on. Chelsea flew back to Stanford early in the month, and Hillary was left to endure her sequester in Washington alone, the fabric of skirt suits and the helmet of blonde hair like a shroud of armor. She needed it more than ever. They whispered about her in pity at the residence, tones hushed and low, whispers that silenced upon her arrival but left the sad gaze of eyes, sorry eyes. All of America had read about what her husband did when he fucked around; Starr's report had been released to the public and published on the Internet. She had not read it, but she heard enough to fill in the gaps Bill had purposefully left from his own account in August: Monica with his cigar, the time he'd gifted her _Leaves of Grass._  At night, she stretched out in their bed, alone, arms and legs roaming over the cool sheets, feeling the emptiness in the places where he'd lain for years, and parsed apart the past and the present. And tried to imagine the future.

Starr's independent counsel had offered its referral to the House of Representatives for impeachment. Hillary turned the word over in her mind, and it tasted like the summer of '73, the summer she had worked on the Nixon impeachment committee. She remembered the night in Washington then, at Sara Ehrman's apartment, when he'd made conciliatory love to her after having wronged her the very first time, and she'd bitten down on her bottom lip and had swallowed the blood, the new, stinging ache of betrayal. _Impeachment_  smacked of yogurts downed at Sara's kitchen table, nights spent prowling her bedroom waiting for the phone to ring, the drowsiness of sleep deprivation in early mornings. She'd spent those weeks laboriously studying the grounds for impeachment, analyzing the historical precedent, and she remembered her own assessment of the Johnson impeachment, how she had found it a sloppily arranged, ill intended move on the part of his political opponents to implicate him for nothing quite along the lines of high crimes and misdemeanors. In the late September of '98, Hillary felt the same.

Bill's possible impeachment, and the consequent potential of removal from office, would be the ultimate unraveling. _Those bastards,_  Hillary would think, and, in spite of herself, she felt the urge to once again lift up her sword and shield and head off to battle. Savage the enemies. In the month following his confession it was the hostile conspiracy of the Republicans that worked as a strange antidote, buoying her; as they tore him apart, she'd piece him back together in her mind, knowing that he was broken in all the wrong places and in all the ways that broke  _her_ , but not at all the monster they made him out to be, not the incompetent president who deserved such a historical deattribute.

She wanted to be logical as she came to her conclusions for the future, but her mouth would go dry when she pieced him together and remembered the good with the bad. He was an impossible man, her husband. Their whole marriage, he had chased after skirts, disappeared in the night, broken her heart over and over. And still, she could not doubt his love for her, nor her love for him. With pride she would regard the little family they'd raised and how good he had been, the father of her only child. She remembered the night Chelsea was a little and had wanted to buy a coconut to taste. When they couldn't split it open with a hammer or a screwdriver, they'd finally, exasperated, taken to bouncing the fruit's impossibly hard shell against the concrete driveway of the governor's mansion, doubling over with laughter until they couldn't breathe, arms clutching waists, the trooper stationed at the front door regarding their antics with a confused amusement and a mouth twitching at the ends with mirth. That was the man she loved. And the man who loved her, who had cradled her head against his chest, face racked with fear, when she'd nearly been killed by the volley of lights on _60 Minutes._ The man who had whispered, "I'm in love with you, _Hee-a-ree,_ " the day of their wedding, who had laced his fingers through hers when their daughter had been pulled from her body, who, with the reverence of religion, had undressed her the night of the first inaugural balls, his hands she so adored gliding over the jewels, smoothing over the newly exposed fresh, gathering her firmly at the waist, lifting her from the purple silk naked into his arms.

It was hard to think of leaving, when she was still so in love.

In order to stay, she forced herself to formulate at least figments of logic, to take the scraps and pieces of their life and lay it before her like evidence, to make something of the mess. She was incredibly analytical by nature, rational in purpose, a lawyer when it came to nearly every matter, it seemed, except Bill. Now she forced herself to reconcile the man who lied to her with the man who loved her. Yet no matter how much she pressed herself, she was left with  _Why? Why? Why?,_ what she couldn't answer on her own.Like the litigator standing before the jury, posing endless questions to an absent witness. If she was going to stay, it had to be different this time. She could no longer swallow her resentments, wander through his half-truths, fight and fuck it out, only to fall into false security and then be blinded yet again. This time, she needed to be mended.

 

Bill stood up from the resolute desk when Hillary entered the Oval, and she saw the consternation pass over his face. He gulped; she watched his Adam's apple bob up and down. In the past weeks, they had hardly spoken alone.

"Can we talk?" she asked, feeling a stranger in her own home.

"Of course." Bill circled the desk and motioned to the sofa.

Hillary sat down and he perched on the opposite seat, the sea of plush carpeting and a heavy coffee table separating them. She had never felt the space between them so much so until that moment, with her hands folded on her knees and Bill anxiously leaning over in his seat, large blue eyes wide and attentive. She had a flash of the times they'd curled up on the sofa in the Oval, and her chest heaved at the memory.

"Okay, well," Hillary twisted her hands together. Her eyes darted to the floor before she forced them up to meet his. "I don't want to leave you," she admitted flatly.

She saw him exhale slightly, shift in his seat. _Relief._ He remained quiet, waiting for her to speak again.

"I love you," she said slowly. Her tone was thoughtful, as if stating a fact she'd long considered rather than an ardent declaration of affection.

There were tears glistening in his eyes. "I love you, too," he blurted.

Part of her wanted to fling herself by his side, throw her arms around him. But that would have to be left in the past. And so she remained steadfast, offering no more acknowledgement of his sentiment than an awkward nod. "So, like I said," she continued after the beat, tone patient, purposeful. "I don't w _ant_ to leave you. But I can't do this again. Ever. So you have to decide, if you want me."

"Do _I_ want you?" Hillary could tell he was fighting the tears, blinking them back so they wouldn't spill over. "Of course I want you, baby."

"No," she replied, a slight edge of frustration to her voice. She straightened, trying to conjure that characteristic ramrod in her spine. "You really have to want me, Bill. Just me. You can't want the next young thing that falls along again, otherwise it won't work."

Bill was nodding rapidly, quickly swabbing at his cheek with a fist. "I understand. I understand. I _do_ want you."

Hillary went on. "But I've heard this before, Bill. I heard this for years in Arkansas. Every fucking time, you promised to stop, and you never did. It has been my whole life."

"I'm so sorry," he was choking to get his words out. He hung his head to hide the tears streaming down his face. "I'm sorry."

"Twenty years."

 "I know."

"So you have to understand," she paused, tears pricking at her own eyes, and collected herself before continuing, "That it's hard for me to take your word for it. And I just can't do it again, Bill. I really can't. I don't have it in me. I've been hurt too much."

Bill nodded, head in his hands.

"For years and years I just tried to -- accept it, I guess," Hillary had carefully planned this speech, but she tripped over her words now, fumbling to explain why and how she'd stayed. "Push it away, not think about it, pray that it would stop. Because I _loved_ you." She inhaled deeply, prevailed in keeping her cool head as his shoulders shuddered. "But I can't anymore. So if I'm going to stay, this really has to be the last time."

"I know."

"So I want to stay, but we have to do it right this time. We have to fix this. And I don't think we can do it alone." He raised his tear stained face now, and looked at her. "I think we should go see somebody. A counselor. I've have my own reservations about that" -- she swallowed slightly, remembering how she'd squirmed and chafed at the armchair psychoanalyses of her peddled through the press over the years, how they dissected what they esteemed as her lack of emotion as a tendency to disconnect heart from head -- "but I'm willing to do if it would help. If it would do us both good. And I think it could help it be, at least, _different_ this time."

Bill nodded again. "I agree. I will do anything to fix myself."

 _Fix myself._  "There are -- so many questions that I can't answer on my own. Maybe you can't answer them, either. I don't know." She sighed a little, looked to the right, over at the resolute desk, past the barrage of framed photos of her and Chelsea, out the window to the front lawn of the White House, the thick expanse of green. _How strange, to be this powerful, and be so human._ "I think we need help."

"Absolutely." He was shaking his head up and down again, furiously.

Hillary looked back over at him, squarely into his eyes. "I want this to work," she said finally, firmly. "But I can only stay if this is different. It needs to be different. We need to cleanse."

With that, she stood up, not wanting to remain in his presence any longer for fear she'd relent on her pending emotional outburst. He rose, and kept his distance, but offered her a wet smile. "This will be different," he promised. "I will sort myself out, and I'll fight for this marriage. I'll fight for you. I know you've heard this before, but it will be different this time. I'll prove it."

Hillary gave a pointed nod, then turned on her heel and walked to the door. Before exiting, she looked over her shoulder to where he stood, watching her, his eyes studying her every motion. "By the way," she said, and then managed a little wink. "Fuck the Republicans."

He laughed.

 

 

Washington, DC - December, 1998

"So, how are the two of you doing?" Their counselor's hands made a steeple as he looked at Bill over the tops of his glasses.

Bill gnawed on his bottom lip, then gave a thoughtful nod. "Better," he said, running his fingers across the edge of the desk and mulling over the past weeks.

The counseling had been painfully uncomfortable at first. They did eight hours a week, both together and apart, and in the beginning Bill had wrestled with the counselor's probing. He had expected to be leveled with an array of questions about his childhood, but when actually presented with them, he struggled to say certain words aloud, danced around the direct truths. "Have you ever talked about this before?" the counselor had asked, the day he split him open and took him apart. "Only ever with Hillary," he'd said, and then he remembered the first time he had, in the apartment in New Haven, wrapped up in their floral sheets, the drag of her flat hair against his bare chest as he spoke.

And so he forced himself to speak then, and once he did, the anecdotes poured out of him. His stepfather, lodging a bullet into the kitchen wall with a fourteen caliber rifle, the sound of his mother weeping, in her hospital white, locking Roger in their bedroom when his father came home drunk and violent. The counselor had simply nodded while he spoke, big blue eyes blinking, and then asked the obvious questions. "How did that make you feel?" _Like shit,_ Bill had thought resentfully, but accepted the challenge of fashioning his feelings into words. For weeks, it had gone on like that; the counselor cutting up his life and laying it bare before him, both the miseries of his childhood and the self destructive periods of Arkansas, the dark days and the litany of women, and he hated what he saw but went on. " _Why_ do you think you cheat on her?" the counselor had asked, finally. Bill had wanted to pull his hair out. _Well, you're supposed to tell me!_  "I guess," he had said, slowly, thoughtfully, tripping over his words, pauses like full stops in between, "I never ever felt good enough for her. Never good enough for what she wanted me to be. And I was ashamed of needing her, and it's almost been -- like bouts of independence, I guess. Of acting out."

Their counselor was able to conjure up some logic from his behavior, then; impulse control, compartmentalization, trauma. He had a way of staring at Bill through the thick lenses perched on his nose, of laying his palms flat and open on the desk and then pulling together the links, braiding the past with the present, dissecting the encyclical rhythm of his life. Bill still did not like what he saw, but it soothed him to hear the counselor's calming voice weave together the tapestry of his life, to feel himself come together after being so apart. _Broken, broken all these years._

In the past few weeks, he had felt a healing. A wholeness.

"She's laughing," Bill said, smiling. "The big one. All of her teeth, the back of her throat. It's always been one of my favorite things about her, you know. And...she was on the cover of _Vogue_ this month. Did you see it? She looks beautiful, she's got this big, heavy red velvet gown on. My wife, on the cover of _Vogue._ "

It had been difficult with Hillary early on, too. While Bill had, from the start, forced his own half hearted attempts at answering the counselor's questions, in their joint sessions Hillary could barely bring herself to offer more than _yes_ or _no._ She had fidgeted in her seat, tangled her hands together, refused to look at Bill as he stared at her profile which he knew so well, the straight edge of her nose and the round apple of her cheek. When their counselor asked how he felt, Bill would watch her dissolve into damage control mode, lift the battling shield around her. She'd answer questions as if she was on the set of _60 Minutes_ or the _Today_ show; "I love him, I respect him..." But, she, too, when prodded, had finally split open one session, driving the stake through his heart all over again. "Why did you give her that book?" she'd asked, mouth slightly open, a smattering of tears on her cheeks.  Bill was startled; he wasn't sure, until that point, how much she had read of the Starr report, or if she had seen any of it all. When she referenced _Leaves of Grass_ , he felt the drop of his stomach, and remembered their first summer together, in Berkeley, reading Whitman aloud to her in the sand. _Why? I don't fucking know._ "I'm sorry, baby, I'm so sorry."

The counselor had once asked him, very pointedly, what Hillary meant to him. Bill had been dumbstruck. Hillary was everything and anything that had ever _happened_  to him; whatever had happened that mattered, in the end. And so he had said, simply, "She is my life." Their counselor had replied, "Remember that."

_I have always loved her very much, but not always very well._

"And we're talking now like before. It's been gradual, but..." Bill trailed off. The counselor had prescribed conversations. "You fall into patterns," he'd said. "Try to talk about something other than work." They had carved out the occasional Sunday afternoon for simple things, merely to be together again; dinner in the second floor of the residence and then watching television on the couch, Buddy resting at their feet, shoulders touching. In the earliest weeks of autumn, he had touched her ever so carefully; had placed his hand on her shoulder blade, guided her through doorways by the small of her back, and had felt her flinch beneath his grasp then. But she was accepting and offering gestures of physicality now. He had been assuaged by relief when she had begun reaching out to wind her hand with his again, when she had kissed him on the night of their wedding anniversary. _Twenty-three._ The soft seam of her mouth, the wide corners of her lips, the warmth of her tongue. He had pressed into her and felt his knees give out. "It's far better."

"Well, this is all good to hear," their counselor said, allowing a faint expression of approval to flit over his face. "Remember, in order for this work, you must keep up the effort. You can't fall into those patterns from before. That's what happened in the past, and what will be detrimental to your future."

Bill nodded. "You know, I'd made -- efforts, I guess, to stop in the past, but it was always in the sense of, _well, I'm broken, so inevitably I will fuck up again._  The effort was to sit on my hands and shut myself down. But this is different. I've never felt so whole, and so opened up."

 

On the nineteenth of the month, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives. He addressed the American people on the White House lawn in the dwindling light of the late afternoon, and laced his hand through his wife's so tightly that his knuckle was white.

That night, she came to him. She appeared in the doorway suddenly, like a vision. Hillary was still wearing the black suit she had been wearing at the presser, the straight cut of leg and the swathe of her pearls at her neck. Her mouth was red with lipstick. Golden buttons, golden brooch, golden earrings. She smiled as she walked toward him, and sat down next to him on the sofa.

"They won't vote to remove," Hillary said. She had said it repeatedly earlier in the day, but he liked hearing her say it again, liked the clarity of her bright blue eyes when she spoke, the conviction. "They won't have enough votes."

Bill nodded. He, too, knew that the Republicans would not be able to collect the necessary fraction for him to be indicted in the Senate trial, yet, still, the mark of historical impeachment stung. He remembered when Hillary had worked on the Nixon impeachment committee all those years ago, when she had been tasked with combing the history books to research the precedent of the Johnson impeachment. _Now I'm a fucking precedent._ He thought back to how impossibly young they had then. He remembered, too, flying up to Washington and holding her in his arms. She was barely eating, as thin as a rail, and he had mused that her lovely but large head seemed too big for her small body. His Hillary.

He let out a sigh and placed his hand on her thigh. "Listen, I want to tell you something," Bill said. "I just -- wherever we go from here, I just wanna say, that I really and truly believe that the counseling has been beneficial to me."

She cocked her head at him.

"I mean it," Bill went on. "Because I finally _saw_ it all for once. I never really sat it out and looked at my life before, Hillary. I never saw everything; forced myself to see what I didn't like. I mean, I hated myself so many times, I really did. But I never could quite come to terms with it. I pitied myself as a fuckup and wallowed in that for all these years. And I can never quite -- thank you enough for accepting me, and putting me together, and being with me, in spite of all that. In spite of every single thing that I did. For every single sacrifice that you made. I'll never quite understand how you've stayed, but as long as I live I'll be grateful."

Hillary's mouth fell open. "Oh, Bill, honey," she whispered, dropping her head. 

"How did you stay?" Bill mustered. It was a painful, but significant question that he had had been wrestling with for weeks; in a way, he figured, it had been there, nestled in the back of his mind, for years. Pressing his thumb against the tip of her knee, he finally forged the courage to ask it. 

"I love you. I stayed because I love you so fucking much." Hillary's voice was wavering, and he watched her dig her fingernails into the side of her palm, almost if anchoring herself. "I  _need_ you. I won't pretend that it hasn't been hard at times. But I have always stayed because at the end of the day, it's you, it's always you. It's always you, and that choice was never hard to make." She exhaled, then turned back to him with a small smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. "Bill, honey, you are not -- you are not what you think you are. You are not a fuckup. We all have our ghosts. I do, too. You are good, and I have known that. You are a good man, a good father, a good president. And I have always, always known you _loved_ me. Because _you_ accepted _me_. And so for all the reasons to leave, there were always a million more to stay."

"I love you." His breath hitched and he looked at her, his wife, this woman with the sharpest mind he had known, who had carried and borne their daughter, who struck fear in the heart of many a man and whose resolve was like wrought iron but, for him, had thrown herself onto a fire, had bent her life into contortions to suit him. His wife. What she had done for him. And so he said, "All the rest is yours. Whatever we have left, together, wherever we go from here, it's all yours."

Hillary stood up. She extended her hand. "Come," she said, tangling their fingers together. "I want to be with you."

She led the way to their bedroom then. They had not slept in the same bed for four full months.

Hillary undressed him before their bed. She discarded his clothes, lifting his arms from his sleeves and running her flat palms over the expanse of his chest as she undid the buttons. He had dreamed, remembered, and reminisced about that moment for endless nights. _She puts me back together again, piece by piece, on her hands and knees._ Unable to resist, Bill pulled his hands through her hair, tasted her mouth, the sweetness of reconcilliation on her teeth and tongue. She laughed against their kiss, the intonations echoing between them. "I'm not done yet," she reprimanded teasingly as she drew away, strands of blonde hair clinging to his forehead as her fingers grazed his belt buckle.

Hillary let him touch her as she disrobed. As she unbuttoned her blazer, he reached up to feel her, the taught gathering at her waist and the curve that led to her hip, the inward line where his palm fit perfectly, the spread of her body. She stepped out of her pants, and he pressed a kiss to the soft flesh of her stomach, to the hard bone of her hip. _Like coming home_. Hillary cupped his cheek with her hand, and he rose to run his fingers across her mouth, to slide them between red lips. When he kissed her again, he felt the cool necklace at her collarbone brushing against the base of his neck, the warmth of torso her thrust against him, the rise and fall of her chest. Her body, that he knew so well, but that felt so new in his arms. _Like the first time, and the last._

Afterward, they twined in their bed. He was absolved. Wanting to touch her, Bill sat up and smoothed his hands over her, over sternum, chest, hip, thigh. He traced the cesarean scar, placed his open mouth against the flat of her abdomen as he splayed his hands across her waist. He pressed his palm into her, sinking into the hot, flushed flesh. Bill looked up at her, where her regal head was upon the pillow, her hair tousled and her lips parted slightly, and watched as she sighed at his touch, savored the timbre of her moan, the up and down meter of her breathing.  _Are you real? Is this real?_ Bill curled up next to her and pulled the comforter around them. He circled his arms around her, kissing the tip of her spine and whispering over and over again into her hair, her nape. 

"I love you. I love you. I love you."

_She is my life._

 

 

Washington, DC - February, 1999

Her desk was cluttered with Howard's paraphernalia. He had an array of charts, the spinning lines twisting together across the geometric squares on some, the thick, proud spines of labeled bars standing erect on others. There were maps of counties with exhaustive details; the fat grooves marking ragged mountain ranges, the large, flat panes of green illustrating expansive valleys, the crowded clusters of dots bearing tribute to the largest city in the United States. He had spreadsheets; the numbers so dark and severe that Hillary's eyes blinked at the sight, and he had polling data, calculated on long sheet forms that stretched over the edge of the table. At the center was the enormous, plastic map, the edges pointy and sharp, the material thick and heavy in Hillary's hand. She ran her fingers across the middle, let her hand linger, cupping the words  _New York_  printed there in her palm.

 _"_ It won't be easy." Howard had an air of intelligence in his demeanor, in the receding line of his scalp and the frameless glasses he was fond of wearing. When he spoke to her, he was direct, and Hillary appreciated it.

"I know." Hillary folded her bottom lip into her mouth and stared on. 

It was an idea that manifested gently. It had begun when she had thrown herself into campaigning for the midterm elections the previous autumn. It had been as much an attempt to salvage the party in the face of her husband's potential impeachment as much as something to do with herself; to distract her mind, busy her hands, provide a sense of direction. And she had done a damned good job. In a strange, paradoxical turn of events, her husband was down, and she was up. It had made her queasy at the time; she chalked it up to the pitiful outpouring of sympathy bestowed upon her by a country who had found her far less easy to like when she not wading through the grimmest depths of personal turmoil. But, in her typical way, she had spun purpose out of her pain, and the midterm elections had been successful -- as relatively successful as they could be, under the circumstances. She'd rescued Barbara Boxer's seat in California. She'd edged out a victory for Chuck Schumer in New York. And, they joked, if she'd gotten to Illinois in time, she would've saved Carol Moseley Braun, too.

When Patrick Moynihan announced his decision to retire from the Senate, members of the Democratic leadership descended upon her. Their friend, the congressman Charlie Rangel, had planted a tidbit in _The_ _New York Times_ declaring, "Run, Hillary, Run," as early as last November. Other party elites had encouraged her, arguing that she was the only name big enough to beat the Republican frontrunner, Rudy Giuliani. And she'd laughed it off, at first; had almost felt herself saying the words she'd told Sara Ehrman all those years ago: "That's _Bill's_  thing, not mine." 

But, then, too, there was the temptation for redemption. The beckoning toward history. The intoxicating, heady whisper of a promise. The charting of a new direction for _her_ life. The potential for it to be different. The unfinished business.

There was no dearth of logic to fuel the naysayers; many of her closest friends and advisors had counseled her against it, for her own sake. Even with a launch later in the year, the impeachment would still be in the recent rearview of voters. She had never lived in New York before, and the voters there were entirely possible of chewing her up and spitting her out. There was the coattails narrative, and the carpetbagger one, too. And then there would be the gunning of a new political engine, a whole new round of endless campaigning, flesh pressing, political mudslinging. Except this time; this time, it would finally be for _her_.

"There's a chance?" Hillary said, looking back down at the map, gliding her hands over the state, from the tip at the Canadian border to the boroughs of the city grounding the bottom. _New York_. She'd always had an unfulfilled love affair with it, ever since she'd intended to spend a winter break there while at Wellesley and her father, irate, had forced her to return home rather than spend a week in what he deemed as the city of sin.

"Well," said Howard, lifting his glasses from his face and rubbing his eyes. "There's always a chance."

The phone on her desk rang, jolting her out of her thoughts. Hillary knew what it was even before she picked it up. "Hello?"

"Mhm. Mhm." Hillary watched Howard's face as she listened; he had raised his head, and his ears had perked up. She could see him struggling to study her face, his eyes squinting, attempting to discern some telltale notion. It amused her, and she bit down on the inside of her mouth to keep from smiling. "Mhm. Okay, thank you."

She hung up. He stared at her, expectant. Instead, she looked back down at the map of New York, her New York, and pointed at a nodule. "So, tell me about this here."

The Senate had acquitted her husband.

_All the rest is yours._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I'm so, so, so sorry for taking a billion years to get this update up. This chapter was, by far, the one I've most struggled with to date, and college happened to pick up at just the same time. But I hope you enjoy this one! I have one chapter left after this, so if you'll bear with me hopefully we'll get there in due time, lol :)


	10. Landslide

 

> _"Well, I've been afraid of changing,_
> 
> _Because I've built my life around you,_
> 
> _But time makes you bolder,_
> 
> _Even children get older,_
> 
> _And I'm getting older, too..."_

Chappaqua, New York - January, 2000

The day the first of their belongings were moved to the house in Chappaqua, Hillary kicked off her shoes and walked through their new home, stepping gingerly over the cardboard boxes, her bare feet dragging against the hardwood flooring.

Hillary's hand glided across the walls as she inhaled the scent of fresh paint. She'd painted them soft yellow; a warm, milky hue. It paid homage to their first home, in Fayetteville, where she and Dorothy had climbed up on step ladders the day before her wedding and wallpapered the foyer mustard yellow. "But no orange cabinets this time," Bill had teased, when she had made her selection. "No," she'd said, laughing, brushing her fingers over his forearm. "No orange cabinets this time."

She pressed the front door key into her free palm and thought, with a chuckle, that it was the first time in two decades that they would have a home to call their own. Ten years spent at the governor's mansion in Arkansas; almost eight in the White House. Accommodations determined by public favor, always. And they'd made their fair share of adjustments, of course; had done their best to make homes out of those houses, had selected draperies from fat bolts of silk and plush rugs to line those floors and familiar family pictures to hang upon the walls. But the air of temporariness had long lingered, the reminder that it could be all be whisked away in a blink of an eye impossible to shake. Standing in the living room of her new home, Hillary finally felt rooted to a place with her name on the deed.

She padded over to the large bay window steaming with light that overlooked their front yard, and stared out at the trim hedges, the boughs edged with foliage, the strong oak trees bending toward the white shingling of their roof. In more ways than one, Chappaqua reminded her of Park Ridge. The neatly manicured green lawn made her remember the sun dappled summers of her childhood; little Hillary, ponytail twisted high on her head, grass stained knees and hands planted on small hips, nudged out their front door by Dorothy to confront the neighborhood bullies. _There's no room for cowards in our house._ Hillary could remember, still, the sight of Dorothy in the doorframe, apron tied about her waist, and the twitch of her own shoulders as she'd nervously put one foot before the other and forced her way down the street, making an earnest attempt to drum up confidence with each step. When the girl had looked at her through slanted eyes, slot machine eyes, she'd felt her stomach drop; but when she pushed her, Hillary had set her jaw and mustered the courage to shove back. Squinting through the sunlight as she pressed up against the frosted glass, Hillary figured that in even all the years that had passed, that was still, perhaps, as good a lesson as she'd ever learned. _Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton. Dare to compete._

Hillary climbed the stairs to the master bedroom. In the long, floor length mirror that had been propped up next to their chest of drawers, she saw herself made over, yet again, but this time -- finally -- it was at her own discretion. She had taken to wearing pantsuits. She liked the bold, clean cut of the leg and the sharp crease of the blazer; the way the tailored fabric tugged at her body, smoothed over her slim frame. Women had not been allowed to wear pants on the floor of the Senate until 1993, and so donning the garment imbued her with a sense of rebellious purpose that she savored. Swapping out skirt suits for pantsuits marked what, she hoped, would be the transition in her life from a symbolic role to an efficacious one.

She turned her head, slightly, watched herself in the reflection. She had cut her hair, too. It had been trimmed into stylish layers to frame her face; the short, dirty blonde bob just skimming her nape. Hillary thought it mature and practical, but she had been girlishly pleased when Bill, seeing the new hairstyle, had let out a low whistle of approval. "I take it you like it?" she'd asked, and had giggled when he'd whispered into her ear teasingly, "I think it's _sexy_."

Hillary sat down on their bed and ran her hands over the heavy comforter, fingers nipping in at the occasional loose thread. They had consummated this home, too, the way they had the house in Fayetteville, then newly engaged, hot and hurried, impatient fingers scrambling at each other's clothes; and now slower, languid, limbs twisting lazily in the sheets. "We're not that young anymore," Bill had said, and had laughed. Hillary smiled, remembering.

She liked where their relationship was. The healing had been slow. It had to be; the emotional turmoil of their last twenty-five years together had left her bruised and battered, and she carried those scars all that time, the memory of those other women and where his hands had been and how they had betrayed her. But there had been, finally, a weight lifted off her chest. She exhaled easily now; she let out big, deep breaths and felt how effortlessly her breast fell and rose, all that good air. How it was to breathe without looking over her shoulder, without knowing how her husband craved other mouths and breasts and thighs.

Something had split open. Had shattered, in the crisp, dwindling autumn and early winter of 1998. Slowly, carefully; for months, still, she had waited with nervous, bated breath for what she feared was the inevitable. The piecing together was many moments, not just one. And not all of it had been beautiful. There had been the raw, 3am ache, the open mouthed sob, the sharp hush, the ugly rehashing of what she had, painstakingly, shelved away in the corners of her mind. But the remedy was glorious. The night he had come back to her bed, he had curled at her feet and kissed her knuckle, had nestled against her stomach and held the width of her hips in his two hands, the hands she so adored; the long, slender fingers. In that moment, he made her whole. He stitched up her wounds, applied ointment to the pink-purple of her bruises. He mended her when he ran his lips over the crevice of her collarbone, the damp flat of his tongue like succor. It had been a year since, and in that time, they had laughed and talked and cried and kissed; but together, always together.

They would have less time together, now that she would be up in Chappaqua establishing residency, and he would be down in Washington to ride out what beltway insiders christened the lame duck year. Yet, for perhaps the first time in their relationship, the separation did not induce bouts of anxiety or concerned knots in the stomach. Just the soft, warm taste of kissing languidly in the doorframe as they bid one another goodbye, bodies pressed into each other, arms tangled. He had raked one hand through her hair and tugged at the collar of her suit with the other. "You go and kick some ass up there."

She had laughed, had cupped his jaw in her hands and stared into his steely blue eyes, searched for the flecks of grey. _I've wanted this longer than anyone_ , he'd joked when she had finally decided to run. "You know I will."

"That's my girl," Bill had whispered, eyes fluttering closed to draw her in for one more kiss.

His girl. And she reckoned she always would be.

 

  
Syracuse, New York - September, 2000

"You look beautiful in peach, honey!" a woman yelled out, commenting on the color of Hillary's pantsuit as Bill steered them through the burgeoning crowd at the state fair.

"Thanks!" Hillary shouted back, smiling and squinting through the hazy mid-afternoon light.

Bill grinned and squeezed her shoulder. She did look beautiful. A different kind of beautiful; but beautiful as ever. And she had always been beautiful to him. He could recall the many style alterations in his wife's life, the array of different haircuts and wardrobe mutations throughout the years. The bell bottoms and flat hair of Yale, the thick glasses and perms of the late seventies, the wool sweaters and glistening curls of the eighties. The headbands and heavy blazers early in the 1992 campaign that gave way to the pastel skirt suits and a soft pageboy that fell at her chin; how he used to rake his fingers through the turned in ends. The endless experimentations in their time at the White House, too; "if I want to knock a story off the headlines, I just change my hairstyle," she once joked. Now she was Hillary of the new millennium, and he flushed red with pride as he touched her, felt her effortlessly erect spine and the small of her back through the silk blazer.

The glare of the late summer sun bore down on them, sweat lacing Bill's brow and hands, but Hillary was effortlessly cool and confident as they worked their way through the throng of fairgoers, not even a glimmer of perspiration apparent. Just pink cheeks, made florid by the heat. The crowd, six deep despite the humidity, loved her, and Bill was proud. They called out to him, too -- cheerful chants of "Welcome, Mr. President!" -- but it was Hillary's day, and they stuck their hands and arms across the rope line to press her flesh, bid her their well-wishes. The role of the blushing and beaming spouse was still new to Bill, a pointed shift in the apparatus of their marriage, but he wore it well, his heart brimming with boastful delight as he watched her wind her fingers through an elderly woman's, rock a baby in her arms, bend down to look a little girl in the eye who, in return, smiled up at her full throatily and awestricken. His Hillary.

Country music piped through the speakers and the crowd tittered enthusiastically as they stood before Gianelli's Sausage stand. The servers in paper white hats and aprons stretched over the counter to pump their hands. "Mr. President! Mrs. Clinton!" The clicking and whirring of dozens of cameras as they exchanged pleasantries.

Bill stretched his arm around Hillary's neck. She was grinning from ear to ear when he looked down at her, big blue eyes blinking, just _beautiful_ , and he resisted the urge to kiss her then, her pink cheeks. He leaned in conspiratorially and took a glance at the menu. "Well, honey, what'll we get?" he asked in an obvious way, loud enough for everyone to hear. He winked.

"Well, I think we'll just _have_ to get the sausage sandwiches," Hillary replied, openly amused, and the crowd responded with a complimentary chorus of loud claps and cheers. Her opponent, Rick Lazio, had demurred from eating the same sausage sandwich just a few days prior, the offending foodstuff being the very pride of the Syracuse state fair, and Bill and Hillary were more than eager to demonstrate _their_ earnest appreciation for the beloved meal.

They were passed napkins -- "They're messy, to say the least," the cook noted cheerfully as he turned the sausages over the skillet -- and Bill dutifully tied the bib around Hillary's neck. "Don't pull it too tight," she playfully cajoled as he drew the cloth around her nape, the sheen of her elegant collar. The fairgoers erupted into laughter at her wisecrack, and he bit down on his bottom lip with a grin while he made the knot.

The sausage sandwiches served on paper plates were large and sloppy and loaded down with sharp onions, tangy peppers, thick barbecue sauce. A camera's flashbulb popped as she took her first bite out of the sandwich, and she looked up at the expectant gallery through thick eyelashes, still chewing. "It's great!" she declared, voice slightly muffled, hand cupped delicately over her mouth. The crowd erupted into whoops and applause. Bill put down his own sandwich and pressed a cloth napkin to her mouth, dabbing at the edges of her lips, careful of her coral lipstick; he thought of all the times she had tightened his tie and straightened his collar.

A busboy cleaned off the counter and they climbed on top to pose for pictures, Hillary's legs dangling over the edge. A burly security guard sidled up to them, and Hillary took his thick, meaty hand in her small one. "You've got my vote," he declared, and Bill watched as she leaned in to thank him, rested her other hand on his forearm, smiled with the back of her throat and all of her teeth and the ruby red roof of her mouth. _The same, and so different_. But he was proud, and ran his fingers down her back until she looked over at him and placed her hand on his thigh.

 

  
New York, New York - November, 2000

Even as nightfall descended on Election Day, the novelty of bubbling the circle next to her name that morning -- _her_ own name printed on the ballot, black ink, "Hillary Rodham Clinton," not Bill, but _Hillary_ , Hillary Rodham Clinton for senator from New York state -- had not worn off.

In the penthouse suite of the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, she felt inebriated off of a heady cocktail of emotions; the light, bated breath giddiness of what the future could possibly hold, and then, too the deep, heart stilling anxiety that she always felt on election nights, the dead, dank weight incurred by the potential of loss. A stylist was working on her hair, and she knew she was fidgeting underneath the woman's busied hands, crossing and uncrossing her legs, drumming her feet against the floor. Finally, she wrung her hands together and clamped down on her bottom lip in a desperate attempt to still herself.

The hotel room was swarming with staff -- men and women in blouses and blazers, sleeves pushed up, some in stockinged feet, balancing bulky computers and papers and phones to their ear. Every few minutes someone had something to report to her, and generally it had been good: the exit polls were in her favor, turnout had been high in Manhattan and the suburbs, internal polling had been positive -- but she feared complacency, feared declaring victory too early. The television set was blaring, and she could hear the news anchors largely focused on the presidential race between Al Gore and George Bush, which seemed nail bitingly close. Bill sat in front of the set, looking up over the tops of his glasses at the screen, shaking his head intermittently, and then returning to the two speeches she'd prepared for the night, which he was still fine-tuning with a pencil: one, a concession, and the other, God willing, a victory.

Just before 10:30, one staffer cupped his mouth with his hands and shouted out for silence. "They're calling it!"

A hush fell over the room. Hillary's heart hammered away as someone turned the up the volume on the television, and the clear, distinctive voice of the anchor announced, "Turning to the high profile senate race in New York, we can now predict that the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will be the victor tonight..."

At that, the entire suite erupted into a thundering round of cheers and applause. Hillary, for once, could not speak. She opened her mouth, and then found her throat too tight to find the words. So she simply smiled. A wide smile, impossibly wide. Then she rose and almost felt her knees give out beneath her, felt the dizzying rush of blood to her head as her heart swelled. An onslaught of tears sprung to her eyes, despite herself.

Hillary stood there, basking in the soft haze of victory, tasting the sweetness of redemption, how warm it was on her teeth and tongue. Then Chelsea wrapped her arms around her, the sensation of skin to skin contact startling her out of the paralyzing euphoria. "I'm _so_ proud of you, Mom. I love you. I'm so proud."

And then Bill jumped to her side. He enveloped her, pressed his hands into her back, kisses on the top of her head and in her hair. He was crying, too, whispering, "That's my girl. I knew you would."

When Hillary moved to take her own mother, Dorothy, into her arms, she finally realized the gravity of what had happened: the miracle of it all, that her mother, who had been abandoned by her parents as a child and placed on a train West to futures more uncertain than Hillary herself had ever known, could stand tonight in her embrace and see her daughter be elected to the United States senate. She clutched her mother tight and swabbed her own face with the back of her hand, the profundity not lost on her.

Hillary felt it, then: the addicting, intoxicating rendezvous with the future and what it could hold; the loud, splintering shatter of glass and how it was to stand with the pile of shards at her feet. Glass ceilings, broken.

 

Bill watched her.

"And sixty-two counties, sixteen months, three debates, two opponents, and six black pantsuits later...here we are."

The waves of applause.

She was wearing a teal suit; Bill would remember the exact shade for a long time. _The happiest moment of my life, except for the day my daughter was born,_ he'd say in the weeks and months to come. _Happier than when you won the presidency?_ He would watch and gleefully wait for the puzzlement to pass over their faces. Then he'd say, _No competition_ , with a wink. The two best gifts -- Chelsea, and this -- both bestowed by Hillary.

In Arkansas, when she had shepherded the education reform task force, people would tell them, jokingly, _Looks like we elected the wrong Clinton_. It cut into him, not as any personal deattribute, but because he knew they were right, and he harbored the guilt of her sacrifice. All that time, when he would tell her this, she would merely laugh that laugh of hers, loud and racy, dip her head back until he saw the underside curve of her strong white teeth and would smile, too. "Oh, Bill," she used to say. But it gnawed at him. _Tonight, we elected the right one. Finally._

Bill cried when she spoke to the crowd at the Grand Hyatt that night. From his place on the stage, the spot where she had stood for him for all those years, he could not see her face, but his eyes zeroed in at the small of her back. The carriage of her body. The determined shoulders and the self possession that existed there, in the gestures of her stature. How she tilted her head; the grace, the poetry. Her gentle fingers, stroking the side of the podium. Her straight spine and the soft shape of her hips that he could just make out beneath the carefully concealing silk of her suit. The small twists and turns of her form captivating him, like the very first time.

Her impossibly sharp brain, the finest mind he knew. The thoughtfulness. The way she pulled together and parsed apart. Her voice, clear and precise, none of that soft, Southern breathiness, no jargon. "Get on with it, Clinton!" she used to say in law school when he was storytelling, and then she would put her hand over his to show him that she meant it with love. Hillary Rodham, looking up at him through a curtain of brown-blonde hair, mirth twitching at the corners of her generous red mouth, lifting her thick glasses from her face, and him peering into the deep, bright blue of her wide eyes. _Hillary Rodham, the girl I'm going to marry. I can't stop with her what I've started._

 

Hillary won 55% to 43%. A landslide.

 

  
Washington, DC - January, 2001

On the morning of George W. Bush's inauguration -- for all the _W_ s pried off of West Wing keyboards, Al Gore's fate had been, regrettably, sealed by the Supreme Court case, _Bush vs. Gore_  -- Hillary and Bill stepped into the Grand Foyer of the White House for the last time as its residents. The permanent staff had gathered there for a final farewell, dependable shoulders erect and hands clasped behind backs as they prepared to move one administration out and welcome in another.

It had been a long goodbye for Hillary -- in the last two weeks, she had wandered the residence from room to room, letting the memories assuage her.

She had lingered in Chelsea's rooms, recalling the shrieks of laughter that had echoed in those walls, the sound of music blasted from a CD player. Chelsea had been just twelve when Bill had been elected, unruly curls and braces with rubber bands; now she was a month short of turning twenty-one and would graduate from Stanford in the spring. Hillary had loved seeing Chelsea mature in the White House, had relished watching her blossom from that shy little girl into a young woman in the hallowed halls of history, past and present.

Hillary had spent time admiring the fine architectural details, running careful fingers over crown moulding, gazing at the oil paintings in their gilded frames, craning her neck to admire the sparkling lights of heavy chandeliers, the stately arches. She tried to conjure up how she felt the very first time she'd walked those rooms on Bill's inauguration, moving in on that cold, January morning. Once the Bushes had departed for Houston on Air Force One, they'd burst into their new home like giddy children, dashing past the chief ushers and into the elevator, racing through the second floor, opening doors, pointing, gaping, gasping for breath. When they reached their bedroom, Hillary had tossed her blue velvet hat and kicked off her shoes, jumping on their bed with the unbridled fervor of a little girl before Bill had pulled her down into his arms, and they'd collapsed on the downy comforter in a laughing, blissful heap.

Hillary had brushed her fingers against the soft seat of her favorite chair in the West Sitting Hall, where she'd spent afternoons waiting for Chelsea after school and had passed nights up with a book. She and Chelsea journeyed down the winding path behind the tennis court to the Children's Garden, where the grandchildren of presidents had pressed their small palms into the cement there. Hillary and Bill had spent their last evening on the South Lawn, Bill chucking tennis balls for Buddy while Socks curled up to the side, indifferent and impervious as usual. In that moment, Hillary had tried, painstakingly, to memorize every detail of that view at sunset, cataloging it to remember for the rest of her life.

Now it was time to bid goodbye to the round the clock staff that had made this house a home, and Hillary was profoundly grateful as she worked her way down the line that morning. The florist who had placed carefully arranged bouquets in every room; the chief pastry chef who had baked her many, many mocha cakes at her lowest ebb; the groundskeepers who trimmed the green lawns to geometric perfection; the housekeepers who had kept each and every corner of the residence spick and span. They smiled; some, eyes twinkling, called her _Senator_ Clinton. "Thank you for making the people's house beautiful," Hillary said, squeezing hands and wrapping her fingers about wrists.

Her last goodbye was to Buddy Carter, the veteran White House butler, who each morning had greeted them with a smile and a copy of _The Washington Post_. Hillary pulled him for an embrace.

"Give 'em hell in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton," he whispered. "I have a feeling that this won't be the last we see of you."

Then, with seamless transition, Buddy turned their hug into a dance, whisking her around and winding his arm about her waist as he spun her across the foyer. Hillary laughed, mouth open as they twirled and skipped, the soles of their shoes tapping against the polished marble floor. With a final parting pat, Buddy deposited her in Bill's waiting arms, who, in one fluid motion, laced his hand through hers and continued the elegant waltz down the hall.

Their bodies moved in tandem, familiar. A perfect fit. Hillary dropped her lips against her husband's ear, and whispered, "Do you remember?"

_Do you remember?_

A shared stare across a law library. Starting a conversation. Ideas and thoughts and dreams poured out, in the lap of a statue and in cramped bedrooms and in the solace of small kitchen tables. Breathing life into a vision. Marriage in the yellow front room of that first house, and a tatted lace dress. A daughter, both difficult to conceive and precious to behold. Giving her the world. Setting out onto uncharted territory and fighting for a chance, together. Politics of the personal. The taste of victory, against all odds. Pride, warm and sweet and uncontainable. Crystal visions, realized. The work of their lives. Mending wounds, shattering glass. The beauty of survival. And love. Love, and again love, and again love.

"I remember."

A story, the two knew, that was not meant to end there, as they turned the corner of the Grand Foyer. Hillary and Bill pressed into one another then and, together, faced outward and onward.

* * *

 

_"Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season, we shall reap, if we do not lose heart."_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How badly wish I could've ended this story with foreshadowing of a President Hillary! 
> 
> Thank you so, so much to everyone who has left such kind comments as I've worked my way through thirty years of their story <3 I had a great time writing this and I hope you all have enjoyed reading it. I do have some ideas up my sleeves for future stories, so I should be back around, sooner or later ;)

**Author's Note:**

> So many Fleetwood Mac songs remind me so much of certain phases of their lives, so I decided to chronicle their relationship from 1971 - 2001 based on various lyrics/songs. For the most part, I'm not planning on taking that much of an artistic license and am trying to ground what I write in certain facts or anecdotes that I've read in other places, whether it be articles, biographies, their memoirs, etc. The majority of what is in this chapter comes form their personal accounts in My Life & Living History, and interviews :)


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